Worst. Weekend. Ever.
For some reason (we still don’t know why), the school’s computer room was closed all weekend, from Friday evening to Monday morning, which meant we had no way to prepare anything for our classes. Fortunately Rebecca was able to make her lesson plan with just the photocopier, but she almost died when she couldn’t access YouTube for 48 hours. The computers are running again now (obviously), so we think they must have been shut down because of a problem and not because the school didn’t want us using them. Although just in case that had been the reason, I prepared a nice long speech in French for whoever made that decision. The highlights of last week…
- The first week back after vacation was difficult, both for me and the students. I had a class on Friday that was really awful. My schedule has changed slightly for the new semester: two of my classes with Caroline were replaced by two with Madame Gady. I had one of the new classes for the first time today, and I have the other one tomorrow. I think they’ll be good groups.
- On Thursday I managed to compact a lesson plan designed for 45 minutes into just 10 minutes (it took longer to go over their homework than I had anticipated). It was on the 2008 presidential election, and I think I managed to give the students a good basic understanding of it.
- I bought a lovely calendar of Monet paintings for 2008 that has the days of the week in seven different languages - English, French, Spanish, Italian, German, and two more I can’t identify. I learned all the days in German and Marlene was very impressed. Or she pretended to be, at least.
- I gave Sarah some advice about how to open a bank account and navigate the Paris metro, and apparently it was good advice, because now she’s been telling me, "I think Rebecca is always right." If only more people in my life would adopt that attitude.