Progress Report

I feel it's time for an update on how the teaching is going.  I blog often about Paris life and what's going on here, but I spend around half the week away from Paris in Créteil at my lycée.  This blog hasn't said so much about my day-to-day life as I am but one cog in the larger machine that is the City of Light.  Still, it wouldn't hurt to bring you up to speed every now and then with what's been occurring in my life, so here goes.

I've settled in at my lycée fully now.  I spend a lot of time in the staff room chatting to the other teachers and I think I have a good rapport with a lot of them.  I've started to be invited to a few things here and there.  This is great as it's hard to meet French people in any other contexts.  I spend a lot of time at the school, and several teachers have remarked that meeting new people is difficult in Paris; everyone keeps to themselves.

I get a lot of freedom to discuss different subjects with my students.  The past week or so I've talked about gap years, London, Cockney rhyming slang (with my best class, and they hardly got it...) and a film made entirely of YouTube clips called Life in a Day.

The vast majority of the kids are all right, as they say.  They might not be the strongest at English in the world, but most them try hard and we normally get somewhere by the end of the lesson.

Incredibly, I only have two more weeks of teaching left before the bac blanc (mock exams) and then the holidays.  The Year Abroad flies by.  A plus.