la rentrée

Well, I am officially back at work. I had my first lessons with the 3rd year students yesterday. I have group of students who have yet to pass the infamous TOEIC exam and another of students who have passed it. It was a nice easy lesson on some of the current events that happened this past summer. I was also planning on using the first half hour (of an hour and a half class) for intros, because clearly not all students would have had me last year (I only had 2 out of the 6 classes).

Boy was I ever wrong! In the non TOEIC group, while some students who came yesterday never came to class last year, I recognized them immediately from the presentations they did for me. All the rest were faithful class goers. In the TOEIC group, every single person who decided to come (about half of the ones on my list) had me as a teacher last year. So much for introductions! I basically had them run through their names to refresh them in my mind, and we were off! I basically rambled on for an hour and half, tried to crack some very bad jokes, and tried to get them to volunteer some English responses out of them to varying degrees of success. While I'm sure half of these students are tired of me or think I'm crazy, I think they're still happy to have the "cool" young American teacher. They might have been curious about the new teacher, but I think that is dying quickly out especially after she kept her students much later than Jane and myself.

In any case, la rentrée ça s'est fait.

I spent the next few hours lunching with the colleagues and then showing the new colleague around, so she could take care of some admin type things. NEWS FLASH! French admin is just as complicated for the Frenchies! We spent the afternoon walking around in circles at times and then learned that her contract is not yet signed by the Minister of Education or whoever, so she can't sign it and may not be paid for this month until the end of October. Yikes!

Later, I met up with a Couchsurfer who is working near Valenciennes until the end of the month but actually lives in Leuven, Belgium. We grabbed a few drinks and then went out for a pizza. We had a nice time chatting, and he was kicking himself for not looking for local Couchsurfers earlier, because he basically only knows his co-workers in the area. We should hopefully be hanging out again soon, and I now have a place to stay if I ever make it to Leuven! For any of you "classy" beer drinkers, Leuven is the home of Stella beer. Although Stella isn't actually a classy beer here, it's basically the cheap student beer. Funny how reputations change according to the culture.

And in very EXCITING news, I just tickets to go visit Hannah in Strasbourg for a weekend at the end of October. CANNOT WAIT!