Life lessons

Today I realized that I was the worst kind of student--sure, I was a nice kid with good grades, but I was so quiet! Like many, I was shy and too often afraid of making a mistake. Now that I am a teacher of sorts, I see that it is the talkative, maybe even the 'troublesome' kids that are the best in the foreign language--and maybe any--classroom. They are the ones who have no fear in talking to me, so they can play along with the games and lessons I bring up, using broken English, but English nonetheless.

Today's first class was full of nice terminales, so their English should have been pretty decent. They didn't say a word besides 'yes' or 'no'! During Would You Rather?, a game that kids two years below them could play along with for half an hour, I had to give up on because they refused to answer--it was like deer in the headlights! I told the professor this after the class, and she said that all of their teachers complain about it. They're great on paper and in their graphic design classes, but they are as silent as mice.

For my second hour, I got the best five in the class for the whole hour, while the others revised their last test. I did the powerpoint on Tennessee, talked about stereotypes, taught some American slang, and played Two Truths and A Lie, where they had to make up their own three and I had to guess the lie. The stereotypes lesson is hit or miss, I'm finding. Some groups stare blankly, and others really get interested when they hear about French stereotypes that Americans have, including:
-They eat cheese, frog legs, snails, and drink wine.
-They all smoke.
-French people hate Americans.
-They wear berets.
-French people are always well-dressed and stylish.
-French people are lazy--they don't like to work and they often go on strike.
-The French don't take showers. (The students all want to know where this comes from!)
-All French people live in Paris.
-French people always wear black.
-French cooking is the best in the world!

I think this lesson helps because it makes them realize that I'm not a normal teacher and that I am a foreigner with different ideas about people.

So tonight is a birthday bar gathering for one of the British assistants, Eleanor! PA is working a wine and cheese tasting for foreign university students, so I'm just hanging with the assistant crowd. Luckily, I don't have work until 3 tomorrow!