On "Teaching"

First, I'd like to mention that looking young while working at a high school definitely has its disadvantages. Like today for example, I spent half an hour looking for the class I was supposed to be working with because they weren't where they were supposed to be then gave up and started walking back to my room, only to be stopped by a stern old man who asked me "mademoiselle, vous allez ou la?" in a rather rude fashion. And when I told him that I was the English assistant, he just said "oh" and walked away. No apology, just a haughty "oh." Rude, especially considering that it's culturally unacceptable to not say hello before asking for directions. 

But anyway, teaching! Or rather, not teaching. Before I came here, I was worried that I wouldn't have enough topics to cover, that I would be terrible at planning lessons and would run out of things to talk about in class, or that students wouldn't be interested in what I had to say. Fortunately that has not been the case. Unfortunately, it is not for reasons that you might expect. 

My official job title here is "English language assistant." From that, our orientations, and the job description provided in the application, I gathered that my responsibilities should - and would - include working with small groups of students and helping them improve their accents, getting them motivated and excited about learning a foreign language, sharing a little bit of American culture with them, and teaching them about American society. Basically, teaching them English in small groups of 4-6 while facilitating cross-cultural exchange and speaking about my own experiences in the US. What I do instead is give mock oral exams on one-on-one situations. Lots of mock oral exams. I definitely understand why the teachers ask this of me, since most of my classes are with BTS students (students who have finished high school and are doing vocational training) or with terminales (students in their last year of high school) preparing for their bac. Both groups of students have an oral exam that they need to pass before they graduate, and in theory it's a good opportunity for them to have a "practice session" with a native English speaker. The problem is that most BTS students are not at all interested in learning another language, and from what I've seen, not all that interested in formal education in general. Not all BTS students are like that and I've met quite a few who struggle but make a good effort to talk anyway, but I've also seen far too many students who don't understand the most basic phrases, like "how are you," and who spend almost the entire 15 minutes in painful silence broken only by the occasional "bah, je ne comprends rien" ("uhh, i don't understand anything"). And I'll be the first to admit that it does sometimes get frustrating to work with students who simply refuse to try. At the very least, you could tell me that you don't understand in English! Terminales are generally better, so it's usually a lot more pleasant working with them in these kinds of situations. 

But the fact remains that I'm not in France to be a mock examiner for the entire year. We were told explicitly that we should not be working regularly with students on an individual basis, and that we should be talking about cultural and societal differences between the two countries. (Ha. There is obviously a lack of communication between the rectorat and the schools.) But more importantly, I have so much unrecognized skill and potential just going to waste. I can share so much more with the students here, do activities with them that will get them genuinely interested and excited about learning a language that, quite honestly, can be extremely useful. I can do more than hand out documents or images that are selected for this task by the teacher and ask students for their opinions. I can talk about things that literally no one else at this school can. I may not be a licensed teacher, but I do have a lot of experience tutoring and working with students, and understand the challenges involved in learning a foreign language since I myself chose to study one for the past four years. I can and want to do something useful! 

Moreover, it makes so little sense for me to do this kind of work and evaluate students (people who, in most cases, I've never seen before) on their performance. I was educated in the States, which means that I don't really understand the standards and expectations for the different levels of students here. I've never taken the bac or even observed one, and have no idea what the criteria for a passing grade are. I don't know what the grades are. I don't know how much I can fairly expect from which students since I do not know them. Yes, I can give them helpful feedback on pronunciation and grammar, but since I'm not familiar with the exam, I don't know which mistakes are actually important and which you can just brush over. So I write down all the mistakes that they make (and the corrections) in my comments, but I'm concerned that this serves to discourage rather than to instruct. I'd certainly be discouraged if I thought that I had done a good job but was given a sheet detailing 20 mistakes I didn't even realize I had made. It would be so much more useful for me to talk about things that I'm interested in and knowledgeable about, no? I can talk about race and gender, class, immigration policies, the education system, healthcare, American politics, hell, pop culture or even football for all I care, so long as I feel qualified or prepared enough to do so. And I can guarantee that it would be more interesting for students than mock exams that they've clearly already done a number of times. (Ever met someone who can't understand/answer "how are you" but can describe a picture? I have, far too many times to count.)

And so I'm left feeling as though I work a lot, but accomplish little to nothing. I have little freedom in deciding what to do, and in most cases am expected to do exactly what the teacher tells me to do. I'm seldom asked for my opinion or for ideas that I have, and if I am asked to do something, it's to look for documents that can be used in the mock exams. In essence, busy work that I really have no interest in doing. I've resigned myself to it for the most part, but what I do here is not at all what I expected. My job is not yet one that I absolutely can't stand, but it's certainly not one that I enjoy either.

If there's anything I've learned this year, it's just how important job satisfaction is to me. I know that I can come off as too serious and not very optimistic at times, but in truth I'm extremely idealistic. My problem is that I have high expectations - both for myself and for others - and expect to make an impact in everything that I do. I need to feel useful, to accomplish something. If I don't, I become unhappy, and if I'm unhappy, I don't do my work well. I think that I expected to somehow "save the world" or at least improve it a little bit by teaching French adolescents English (really not sure how or why anymore), but I don't know if my being here has improved even one student's language abilities. And the possibility that I may have wasted the past four months of my life is not one that I like to think about.