Au revoir mes cours

After Budapest I had two and a half days left of teaching, something that I think also surprised my students who didn't realize I was already leaving. It was odd saying goodbye and realizing I probably never will see them and the staff again. I wish I didn't see my classes so infrequently so I could've gotten to know my students better. I never was able to build on a topic because I had so many different classes that I would see them at the most once a week, often every fifteen days. This made it hard to get to know their names and their level of English. I did get to see some of their interesting ideas and some of their personalities in my lessons. For example: I did a lesson with my secondes (9th graders) on how to improve schooling where they brainstormed ideas and then as a group decided on the 5 best and presented why and how to implement it, and I had students coming up with environmentally safe schools with renewable energy. I did a lesson with my Terminales (12th gd) students where they were given a news photo and had to come up with a story to go along with it and then they were given the actual story that they had to translate, and I received an elaborate love story based on a picture of poached elephants (the husband defended his wife with his tusks). I usually did partner work lessons to get them speaking and I had some amazing artists in my classes with my preposition lesson where a parter described the photo and they drew what they heard. I also liked the creativity with my Superhero lesson when there were Fashion Victim heros, Crazy Monkeys that ate old bananas, and even a superhero whose costume was anti-Nicolas Sarkozy. As usual, you feel in the end "if only I had more time..": to get to know the kids, to share ideas with the BTS students who were basically my age and always were learning about a controversial topic, to get some teaching ideas from the rest of the staff. But in the end my role as an assistant made it hard to do these things with a schedule that put me in classrooms bi-weekly and where I came up with lessons independantly of the teacher and what they were doing normally in the classroom. This is just one of the many reasons I am excited to have my own classroom, where I can watch my students progress and know them in order to make a lesson that fits their leraning styles and interests.