Teaching in Bondy

So for my education seminar class, there is a four week out of class section where we are placed in a school to teach English. Today was my third lesson with my class. The school is in Bondy, which is outside of Paris in "banlieue" (literally meaning suburb in French) about 20 minutes outside Paris, but in total the commute is an hour and a half. We are teaching in the banlieue for a couple of reasons, our teacher wants us to get out of Paris and see how "the everyday French live"and because these are the kids who really need a native English speaker. Their English class is taught by a French woman named...are you ready for this...France (I swear)! She is a great woman and I am sure a great teacher, but in their English class they speak mostly French. The kids in this class are in a special program called Bac Pro. What this means is that since they were around 11 or 12 years old they were picked out as being the weak students who had no chance of making it into the French University system, so they were put on the Bac Pro track. This program starts when they are around 15 years old and is a four year training program, it is like a trade school for high school students. For the most part the kids in my class want to be nurses, and in fact, at Bondy on the third floor there is a full service clinic for the students to practice.

It is very difficult to teach them English, all of the students have been studying English since they were 9, I started French when I was around 13. There are students in my class who can't even form basic sentences "my name is..." etc. I am currently in the position of rewording all my lesson plans so that the majority of the class can understand what I am saying, but that is almost impossible. There are a few students who have a great understanding of English and they help the rest of the class by translating what I am saying into French, and since I can speak French if they translate something wrong I can help them understand something they maybe didn't understand. As tough as it is to teach them totally in English, it is great because they are so interested in American culture and a lot of them want to visit or live in the States one day. The teacher was telling me that they ask her questions all the time, they think that I am not going to come back week after week. This is another thing I find so frustrating, for an early age, these kids have thought they could not succeed, that no one cared about their ability to learn. One student was telling me it is an honor to be taught by a native English speaker, and an American on top of that. I never realized that I took for granted the access to some of the best teacher that I have at UW. I am able to (almost) fully communicate in a language they have been speaking since birth, while they are hardly able to say hello and goodbye in a language I have been speaking since birth.

I have learned so much from this experience, I really like the class I am working with so I decided that I will stay on for a volunteer basis next semester as well to continue working with the class. When I was talking to France to see if that was possible she almost jumped up and down, her and I are working together to form a English club where the students can come and practice their English. So next semester I am looking forward to getting that off the ground while still teaching a couple lessons a month to my class, it should be an interesting semester! Love from Paris...