More strikes in the education system

The magnificent facade of the administration building

French teachers are planning a strike on Thursday 10th February in protest at the planned reduction in teacher numbers as of the next school year.

The strike is planned to begin in Bobigny.  Next week, students at my school will be taking their mock exams for the baccalauréat.  

16000 posts nationwide are to go nationwide next September.  According to Le Parisien 571 of those will be in the Créteil academy.  That's despite an apparent rise in the number of pupils in the academy.  The Education minister said that "quantity is not the right response to the problems in the education system".  

Around twenty of my colleagues went on strike yesterday, protesting in front of the administration building in Créteil.  Apparently the tightening will mean classes have to merge in my school.  Considering that some of the classes already have thirty of more pupils, it's not surprising that many of my colleagues are unhappy.

It's a familiar story of having to do "more with less" as cuts bite.  They don't seem anywhere near as bad as those in England where 19% is being axed on average per department.  Still, there's not much point in telling the French that things are worse elsewhere, as any cuts that are planned with always be met with fierce hostility from the CGT.

The strike was voted by those who were in the staff room earlier in the week by a show of hands.  This appeared to me rather unfair on those who weren't there.  I spoke to one teacher on Thursday who told me he wasn't fully aware that there was a strike on.  In Britain Thatcher made pre-strike ballots part of the law.  Now you won't find too much praise for Maggie on this blog (we teachers and assistants are Left wing ideologues) but it doesn't seem fair that if you didn't happen to be in the staff room at the right time, you missed the chance to have your say (although you have a right not to strike if you don't want to).  Nor did it seem right to have a public vote - if you are in a minority of one it takes courage to contradict your colleagues.   

For me though, I'm now on holiday as I'm not needed for the mock exams and then it's half term.  I'm planning to explore France a bit more, and if I do I'll post reports, photos and what not. Ciao.

Kubisme

Sometimes I get stuck for things to write about for this blog.  I'll be sitting at my computer on Twitter or the BBC pondering what could be the subject of my musings, and nothing will jump out at me.

The solution to these writer's blocks is normally to take a walk.  I might subconciously have been following this advice from Wannabe Hacks about looking carefully in the streets for news.

At any rate, I was taking a stroll and noticed this enormous piece of graffiti (street art?) in the 11th arrondissment behind a cafe. 

This piece was truly massive, at a guess I'd say about 50 feet high on the Rue de Charonne. It refers to Cubism, a form of art that Picasso amongst others practised.

If you want more examples of street art in Paris, check out this post by Anne or Urbanmedia.  A plus.

New exhibition at La Monnaie

I was browsing the Paris website at the weekend for things to do and a new exhibition caught my eye.  Peurs de la ville is about Paris (bien sûr) in some of its most troubled and turbulent moments.  It captures the fighting that raged during the Liberation of Paris in 1944, May 1968 and more recently the unrest in the banlieues in 2005 and 2007.  Many of the photographs are provided by Paris Match. 

That alone would make it worth a visit, but what makes this exhibition a bit different is the section, which elsewhere has been called Guerre ici by veteran war photographer Patrick Chauvel.  This photojournalist has taken images of conflict and war from war-torn places such as Afghanistan and superimposed them onto photographs of famous Parisian landmarks.

The results are highly realistic images of street battles by the Sacré-Coeur, a solitary tank in front of the Arc de Triomphe and a stricken Tour de Montparnasse.  As a fan of dystopian fiction, I found the images extremely interesting.  They are also designed to make us appreciate the peace we enjoy in the West by bringing war closer to home.  The original conflict photographs are displayed as well, allowing the viewer to compare and contrast.

There is another small section about Google Street View and its controversial attempt to photograph the world's streets, but compared with the Guerre ici section it is rather uninspiring. 

If anything, the exhibition is slightly too short; but at 6 Euros for a plein tarif, I would definitely recommend it for a thought-provoking visit.  It's on until mid-April.  A plus.

Don't trust this blog

Or at least don't if you believe Ben Vautier.  He's an artist who creates a lot of his work using text to form paradoxical statements.  The one above means "you must not trust words".  As someone who is hoping to write for a living one day I was mildly offended at this stab at my potential future profession, but a more Machiavellian side of me spotted an opportunity to spin the irony of the message still further and write about it instead.


I actually took this photo on a wander around Belleville before Christmas but it's been languishing in my camera memory until today.  It's home to a large Chinese population, with lots of Asian restaurants and supermarkets around the Rue de Belleville, where this picture was taken.

On another amble around my quartier today I spotted a few more interesting examples of street art.  They'll be along soon.  A plus.

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.

Review of Andrée Putman in Paris Voice

Some of you may recall that I reviewed an exhibition in Paris Voice recently.

Well, the editor very kindly published another review I did for the online magazine about the exhibition currently on at the Hotel de Ville about Andrée Putman.

You can find it here.  You can also find all sorts of stuff on the magazine's website about Paris - film and book reviews, things to do etc.  Have a look.  A plus.

2011: what's new?

Parisians have been going to the sales

Well, a belated Happy New Year to you all!

Last time I blogged Paris was shivering in extremely cold December weather.  The snow had forced Eurostar to drop the "high-speed" from its high-speed rail, thus the journey from Paris to London was painfully slow.  Add to that "frozen doors" at the deserted Ebbsfleet International and I very nearly missed the last train back from London home.

I had spent nearly three months away from Blighty, easily a personal record.  It took a day or two for the habit of speaking French to wear off.  My sleeping patterns were happily disrupted by the Ashes.  Christmas and New Year were lovely and quiet and I also turned twenty-one. 

Before I knew it I was back on the Eurostar opposite a screaming toddler and two embarrassed parents on the way to Gare du Nord.  I knew I was back when I heard the annoying "dah, dah-dah dah daah" of the SNCF tannoy system.

So what's new, you may ask?

For a start, it's warmer.  We've been blessed with sunny and warm-ish weather these last few days, and Parisians have been taking advantage of this to browse the sales.

There have been changes on the political scene.  President Ben Ali of Tunisia resigned and fled the country he had ruled repressively for twenty-three years.  There have been demonstrations in Paris and around France in support of the uprisings in the North African country.

Jean-Marie Le Pen has also called it a day after decades of being at the heart of far-right politics in France.  He hands over control of the Front National to his telegenic daughter Marine.  The high point of Jean-Marie's career was shocking France in 2002 by bringing his unpleasant politics into the second round of the French presidential election.  Marine has her sights set on disappointed Sarkozy supporters in the 2012 presidential election, and Le Monde reported that one in five French people have a positive opinion of her.


Well, a reflective blog post to start 2011.  Apparently 'tis the season for introspection - today is supposed to be the most depressing day of the year.  I hope you cope all right.  A plus.