School starts in 11 days and I’m so excited! I love my job and being on vacation for nearly 5 months was getting a little old. I can’t wait to get back in the computer room and audio labs and play with the technology teach students English. Everything will be so much easier this year since I know what to expect and I’ll have a lot of the same students because I teach first and second year classes.
Plus there’s a new American lectrice in the literature-based/future teachers language department that I’ll probably be sharing labs with. (I teach in the business/international relations-oriented language department.) My schedule for the semester is almost finalized. I have six pronunciation labs, four translation labs, three vocabulary classes, and one class of “soutien” for the exchange students from the Aosta Valley in Italy. I love these students. They are so motivated! They’re studying their 3rd (English) and 4th (Spanish or German) languages and their English is usually quite good already.
Luckily I start at 1:30pm everyday Monday-Thursday, except for Wednesdays when I have one lab at 9am. It really sticks out on my schedule. I guess I can always run home and go back to bed afterwards during my 3.5 hour break. And there’s really no way around it. I’ve already looked over all of the schedules hoping to find any other hour to put it in, but no luck. At my university, and a lot of French universities I think, the schedules are made for the students so they don’t actually get a choice when their classes are. When you sign up (and I do mean sign up, not apply, because anyone with a high school diploma can go to a public university in France) to do a program, you basically choose your “major” right then and you take classes with the same people every semester. There are no electives or general education requirements, and with our program, you must start in the fall because the winter semester is just a continuation of the fall semester.
It’s going to be so nice being less than 10 minutes from campus instead of 50. I will save so much money on gas and tolls. And I might actually use my office this year! I already cleaned out my closet to make sure my work clothes still fit. I’m so geeky for school that I even bought a pencil case for my whiteboard markers. I always giggled a little when I saw my high school and university students set out their pencil cases on their desks because to me, pencil cases are for 5 year-olds. But in France, every student and teacher has one no matter what age they are. So when in France…
