Crunching through autumn leaves on a summer’s day

I, like you, have been surprised by the sunny weather over the past 10 days, and it made the French happy which was nice. I had to suffer a hot classroom or office a lot of the time, but enjoyed it when I was out and about and it gave me a good excuse for an ice cream on Friday afternoon!

Teaching

I’m already halfway through my fourth week of teaching and I haven’t told you much about it. Tiredness is starting to kick in, as motivating a classroom full of students to speak English for 19 hours a week takes energy. I understand better why they don’t put so much emphasis on speaking foreign languages in schools when teachers have classrooms of 30 children at a lower level! One positive thing is that my level of French is higher than the students’ level of English which gives me confidence during lessons, as I’m not always dreading the question ‘How do you say X in English?’. They are generally quite understanding it if I don’t know how to say something too. Sometimes we get there after a bit of discussion, other times both sides are left very confused as to how to express a certain French word or phrase in English. I’m starting to grasp the majority of names now too, which is very useful!

The activities that I have been preparing have been working well for the most part, and I need to try and remember that, as disappointing or discouraging moments come often too. As a wise person said at the weekend, some things that I’m battling with are out of my control and it’s not necessarily me as a teacher who fails when certain things don’t go to plan.

Yesterday someone fainted in my lesson! It was quite a surprise to hear a shout of ‘Alexandre!’ in response to a question I had asked and I looked up to see one of the students on the back row was on the floor, blacked out. It was stuffy in the classroom and I guessed he had just fainted so I told his friends to open the window to get some air in and lift his legs up. He soon

came round, and they got him to stand up rather too quickly for my liking, but he was ok. I asked if that kind of thing had happened to him before and he said ‘yes’. I prayed that it wouldn’t be me who fainted next (I have a bit of a history of that too)! The problem with that room is it’s very hard to keep the window open because it doesn’t want to stay open on its own.

Just have a little patience...

Ok so already within 5 weeks of being here there have been plenty of opportunities to grow my patience, and there are plenty more on the horizon! God must be up to something. The colleague who does the same job as me talks constantly about anything and everything, and although I find some of the comments interesting or amusing, other things are not and I get frustrated when I’m trying to work. My landlady also loves to talk and make her opinions known in a loud voice (as does her ex-husband who has visited a few times). There is also Jade, a 4 year-old who is child-minded at our house until 9pm two evenings of the week and 8pm another, and understandably gets a bit tired and grouchy at the end of the evening. Those who know me well (or maybe you’d guess), know that I seek out peace and quiet over loud and noisy, so I find certain characters can test my patience. Then there is Manqi, who faffs around even more than I do and I’m now appreciating why some of my family get annoyed with me sometimes!

Church

I’ve chosen which church I’m going to commit to this year, it’s called La Rencontre. It’s the one which my landlady goes to and my two other housemates are going to go there too. It’s a warm and friendly church and I feel at home there already.

Agape campus

This is the name of a Christian student group in Rennes and I’m sure you’ll hear more about them over the course of the year (I know I’m no longer a student but I’m linked to the campus and they’ve welcomed me with open arms!). The group seems very active with lots of different ideas for outreach and it is blessed by the presence of a number of staff workers to lead it. I went along to the welcome BBQ where there was an encouraging number of students (many of us from outside of France though), and I’ve also been to a small girls’ group meeting which was nice.

(Pic of me and Manqi, my housemate at the BBQ)

That’ll do for now, well done for making it to the end!

Fiona x