i was lying in bed last night for some reason having a hard time falling asleep, which has always been a problem of mine- i like the night time. around midnight my brain just starts firing. it's really not that great when u also have to get up in the morning. i was lying in bed and a few thoughts were bothering me. i used to keep a lot of journals. i've got a bunch of old spiral-bound notebooks at home just lying there, from various different times- high school, college, post-college. i dont do it anymore. and i was missing the act of writing those entries. not that i'll ever go back and read them again, but somehow at the time it seemed clarifying, helped me understand something about what happened during the day that i didnt grasp the first time around (call it la pensée de l'escalier, it's my specialty). and rather than start another paper journal, fuck it, i'll put it online. isnt that what this century, our generation, our day and age is supposed to be about? putting yourself out for the world to see.
anyway, it doesnt matter if one or two of my friends read this or no-one does, i'm doing it so one day i'll remember what the hell i was doing back in my little low-budget apartment in bordeaux in the first decade of the twenty first century. what am i doing? it's 11.40am on tuesday. i'm dicking around on the internet. one thing i do have now is the luxury of time. i work, but if i compare with my friends at home it seems like nothing. i have to go teach this afternoon, so my time limit on this post is about twenty more minutes.
i'm teaching english to kids in elementary school. the kids are awesome, i really love the contact with them. they're so smart but at the same time so undeveloped mentally. they're seeing all this shit for the first time and most of them have their eyes wide open and are curious about everything. their energy seems limitless. at the same time that's part of the difficulty of this job. i feel as though i've been given a nearly impossible task. i'm supposed to engage these kids in learning english, primarily orally, in a way that keeps them active, motivated and at the same time challenged, maximizing their contact with the spoken language. i'm supposed to do that with groups of eight to eleven year olds ranging in class size from fifteen students to twenty eight students. i have eight classes that i see twice a week. i counted, it's something like 180 students. now if you want to try to get 28 nine-year olds to play a game in which you tell them they should only speak english and expect things to go down smoothly, well, i dont know how best to disillusion you, but suffice it to say: it's not gonna go down smoothly. therein lies my challenge, and some days it works great, other days abominably. actually in some classes it works perfectly. but in others i occasionally have to just give up the pedagogical idealism and give them stuff to write and do boring shit. actually, we write something every class. it's neceassary to have la trace écrite. but i must admit, and of this i am not proud, that i have given lines to copy. it's like the simpsons- i will listen to the teacher in english class- twenty times. i felt ridiculous giving that as punishment, but it's how the system operates here in france. somewhere principal skinner is smiling on france. so here is my dilemma. maybe i'll be able to work something out in this exercise of blog-writing. so, as the youtubers say, here goes nothing, and as i say, fuck it, this is my blog, beeotches.
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