School Daze

Monday morning I had my first experience in the French elementary school where I'm volunteering for the semester. It started off shakily, as I got lost and was nearly 40 minutes late to the meeting. The Midd coordinator gave me awful directions, and forgot to put the school's name or address on the paper, so I had to call her and she kept telling me to ask someone where to find the street, but I couldn't understand the name of the street (which was Rue Las Casas...apparently the French have trouble pronouncing Spanish words). Finally I found the street, then had to stand for five minutes and wonder how to get into this monstrous building with about 4 doors and eight doorbells. I pressed about 5 before I succeeded and found my way into the school and the director's office. She was super nice and she brought me straight to my classroom. When the teacher opened the door and the students saw me, they immediately stood up and at the teacher's prompting, said "Bonjour" and then "Allo." It was quite adorable and very different from an American class. I'm guessing the students are about 10-11, but I'm not sure and no one has told me yet. I'm there to assist with English lessons, so we started off my alleviating the student's curiousity about me and allowing them to ask me questions in English. They asked things like how old I was, where I was from, why I was in Paris, etc. The teacher insisted they ask in English and I reply in English (I hope they understood...). When they were having difficulty coming up with the sentence in English, the teacher asked one of the two bilingual students to translate the question into English. There are two bilingual students and they're really cute...they must be so bored sitting practicing say "I like apples. I don't like milk" but they get to look really smart when the teacher asks them questions, since they speak better than she does. It was interesting to hear her pronounce the English words, and to correct the students' prononciation, since hers wasn't that great. It was English with a very thick French accent. It was similar to having an American teacher try to pronounce Spanish words for their students...their accent is better than the students' accent, but often still far from the "correct" prononciation. The school is on vacation for the next two weeks, but the teacher asked me to prepare a short presentation on a typical American breakfast for the next time. Should be amusing.