Fin

The procrastination battle between packing and writing a blog post has finally been won, as evidenced here, only because it's easier to drink coffee and write than it is to fold clothes, sort through seven months of French bureaucratic paperwork, clean the bathroom and drink coffee.  If I could have it my way, I'd be drinking coffee all day instead of doing those things.  In fact, that is a highly likely scenario. 

Well, it's over.  Hard to believe, but seven months have come and gone, and I'm finished being an English teacher.  This past week was filled with goodbye parties and goûters (snacks).  For some classes I made no-bake cookies, which were a huge hit.  For other classes, I made peanut butter sandwiches and cut them into sample sizes.  These were an even bigger hit and the kids were saying things like, "Mmm, I love this cake!" and the teacher asked me if we ate these for dessert fairly often in the U.S.  I said yes and left it at that. 

The CP and CE1 classes combined forces to throw me a big party on my last day, complete with pancakes.  In the morning, I helped 60 six, seven and eight year-olds make the batter.  It went something like this. 

Me: "Okay, I think I'm going to crack the eggs, just to be safe."
Six kids:  "Nooo, I want to!  I want to!"
Me: "Do any of you actually know HOW to crack an egg?"
Six kids:  "Yes!  My mom taught me-- I've done it before-- Once, we were making cookies, and I cracked an egg-- No, but I want to try!"
Me: "Fine.  You there, the responsible looking girl who reminds me of myself when I was that age, come here."
I handed her the egg and two seconds later the egg was all over both of us, the table, and the floor.  So, everywhere except in the bowl.

When the first batch of batter was complete, I handed it over to the teacher who volunteered to fry them. 
"The batter's really thick..." she said, suspiciously.  "Did you put enough milk in?"
"It's supposed to be that way," I explained.
"You didn't mix it very well, there are still grumeaux." 
"It's supposed to be slightly lumpy--"
She grabbed the electric mixer and pulverized the batter into a thin, smooth liquid.  "Voilà," she said.  Next, she ladled the batter onto the grill and spread it as thinly as possible with the backside of a spoon, and when she flipped the pancake over, she tried to flatten it.  "Why is it rising up like that?" she asked.  "Is that the baking powder?" 
"Well, that's the point, yes.  American pancakes are supposed to be fluffy."
We both stared at the thin, flattened pancake on the grill. It was a crêpe. 

In the afternoon, the cold, congealed mess of pancakes was brought out, along with jam, sugar, nutella and a few drops of maple syrup.  ("For you, Laura," a teacher said, holding it out.)  So I watched as the teachers spread nutella or jam on my all-American pancakes, or sprinkled sugar on top of them, and handed them out to the kids, who folded them in half and stuffed them in their mouths.  "This is how you serve them, right?" a teacher asked.  "Sure," I said.  You can lead the French to pancakes, but you can't make them eat them like anything else but crêpes.

The pancakes in the bottom right hand corner are suspiciously crêpe-like.

The line for pancakes.

 

 

Students acting abnormally calm.

One final round of "Head, Shoulders, Knees and Toes."

After school, there was a "grown-up" party for me with all the teachers, but I have to admit that I preferred the kids' party.

So now I'm done!  I've said my goodbyes to the teachers and the kids (and guarantee that I will awkwardly run into them at the grocery store at least a few times before I leave), said farewell to my friends, and now all that's left is packing up my place.  So what's next for Laura?  Well, my mom arrives on Tuesday and we're doing the grand tour of northeast France, where I've spent far too much time over the past two and a half years.  Paris, Strasbourg, Nancy and Bar-le-Duc.  (Which is the odd one out?)  After that, I'm off to Brittany to au pair for a little over a month, then over to Switzerland to be a camp counselor until mid-August, then perhaps a detour through Italy on my way back to the U.S.  And then I start my masters at DePaul on September 7th.  I don't know whether to be excited or exhausted for the months ahead.

Now that my time teaching has come to an end, it's hard not to feel the need to analyze my experience.  I'll let you know if I have any breakthroughs, but for now, just two things. 

1) I really like teaching.  A lot.  I've always known that I'd probably enjoy it, because I like working with kids, but this experience really sealed the deal.  I don't know for sure what I'll do when I finish my masters, but it's good to know that teaching could definitely be on the table. 

2) I am not even close to being fluent in French.  Sure, I know how to say random words like lumps and fluffy, and yesterday I learned a slang word for vomit, and I can have conversations without bringing things to a complete halt, but as I told a friend yesterday, I've given up on conjugations and correct grammar.  I hear myself making the mistakes, but I can't be bothered to correct them.  I never thought I'd say this, but I wish I had paid more attention in my high school French classes.  Je suis desolée, M. Stéphan... On the plus side, this same friend told me that the texts I send him are almost always perfect, but then took me through them and asked me to find the errors I made.  Did I mention he's a teacher?

Alright, enough procrastination.  Time to pack!  This might be the last you hear from me for a few weeks while my mom and I travel, but I'll be back with more absurd stories before you know it. 

Send in the Clowns

I walked into school Monday morning, said hello to the principal while we did our usual cheek kisses, and as I started to walk away she said to me as if an afterthought had just occurred to her: "Oh Laura!  Do you know about the clowns?"

Normally, when people ask me questions like, "Do you know about the clowns?" I assume that there's been some misunderstanding on my end.  In reality, they're usually asking me something like, "Do you know that the photocopier is broken?" in which case, I respond, "Oui," even if I didn't completely understand the question, because sometimes it's just easier to say yes and get on with things, like trying to make copies on a broken photocopier and wondering why nobody told you the stupid thing was broken.  In this case however, if I said that yes, I knew about the clowns, I had a bad feeling that this would get me into an even more absurd and confusing situation later.  Before I let myself get carried away with the image of clowns chasing me through the hallways of the elementary school with kids cheering them on, I said,  "I'm sorry, what?"

The principal slowly repeated the question, overarticulating, apparently interpreting my confusion to be caused by the language barrier and not by the idea of clowns running around the school on a Monday morning.  "There are three clowns here," she continued.  "Don't be surprised if they come and disrupt your classes."  Considering this a sufficient enough warning, she went back into her office.

Nobody else mentioned the clowns all morning, except for one of the teachers who said that our Thursday morning English class was going to have to be canceled, "à cause de les clowns."  With no further explanation, he walked away.  So not only were the clowns going to be here all week, I was also clearly stuck in a French absurdist play.

My first class of the day was thankfully clown-free.  We learned "I like/ I don't like," with different types of food and took a class survey to determine the most popular.  Bread unanimously won the vote, beating out even chocolate and pizza.  Even eight-year-olds in France are so... French.   

Yet when I walked into my next lesson, I found myself witnessing three clowns wreaking havoc in the classroom.  Kids were screaming with laughter as one clown madly clicked through the powerpoint presentation the class had been in the middle of before they had been interrupted by the traveling circus; another clown was running in and out of the classroom with handfuls of tissues claiming to have kid allergies; the third was the straight (wo)man, trying to keep her companions in line while picking on the normally uptight teacher, who was red in the face from laughter.  Since the teacher is usually such a disciplinarian, I had to hand it to him for playing along so eagerly.  Even as one of the clowns started confiscating the essays the students had been working on, and crumpling them up and throwing them away, the teacher just stood in the corner giggling.  (I shouldn't have been so surprised.  Mimes, Jerry Lee Lewis, Mr. Bean-- characters that no one finds funny anymore after the age of eight-- are idols in France.  My theory is that because the French seem so concerned with keeping up appearances and behaving in the socially-accepted manner that they find a release in these comedians who are able to make such fools of themselves.)  

After another few minutes, the teacher shooed them out and the clowns said their goodbyes and shuffled out of the classroom, closing the door behind them.  No sooner had the door shut, then did the teacher's smile quickly melt off his face.  He pulled his students' crumpled essays from the trash can, held them up and said, "You're going to have to rewrite these."