Teaching is just another way of learning.

“Yes, hello. Euhhhh… my name is ValentinJeanPierreAntoine. I have, euhhh, fifty - no - fifteen years old.

I live in, euhh, Draguignancentreville. I was born in ParisOrleansNiceStrasbourg. I like, euhh, playing the video games, to do the skiing, and, euhh - Mais no! Tais-toi, je sais pas! Laisse-moi le faire! - Euhh, sorry, I don’t know. That’s all.”

Ah, if only I could tell you how many times I’ve heard this introduction. The first time I work with every class, I give them 30 minutes to ask me questions about my life, where I’m from, what I like to do, you know, the basics. After they’re finished asking me questions, I ask my students to introduce themselves to me and I get to hear what’s written above. I love it! It’s precisely the challenges demonstrated by this introductory that I get to address in my classes.

I’ve been teaching about a month now, so I’ve basically settled into my routine, even though my schedule is incredibly messy. I was lucky enough to work only Tuesdays, Wednesdays, and Thursdays, and I work with 6 English teachers: Madame Deycupère, Mr. Cappé, Madame Molyn, Madame Maillart, Madame Fournier, and Madame Nolf. I work with students in four levels of English: premier (freshmen), secondaire (sophomores), terminale (seniors), and BTS, which is a two-year program after they’ve passed the BAC (their senior exam, like the SAT) where they prepare for a certain career path. The great thing about working with so many levels is that I get to prepare activities ranging from easy to moderately difficult, and I get to explore a variety of media for my lesson plans!

With my freshmen and sophomores, I tend to do pretty basic activities that teach them about America. My job as a teaching assistant is not so much to correct their grammar or teach them new vocabulary (although that does figure into some of my lessons), but rather to oblige them to speak with me and to expose them to cultural differences that their teachers, who are all French, don’t know much about or don’t have the time to teach them. Sometimes I work alongside the teachers and sometimes I take a group of 10 or 12 students to a separate classroom and lead my own classes. With the higher level students, like the BTS students, I can work on more advanced subjects that are not just limited to America: my job with them is to increase their vocabulary, their fluency, and to help them with their pronunciation.

Recently, I’ve been teaching my sophomores about different Native American tribes. Because Thanksgiving is next week and they’ve all learned about the Thanksgiving story in middle school, I prepared worksheets for them on five different tribes: the Iroquois, the Cherokee, the Cheyenne, the Navajo, and the Chinook. They worked in groups of two or three re-writing what they gathered from the texts I gave them, and then they read their work aloud and I wrote it on the board. At the end of class, all of the students had notes for every tribe, so I asked them to take some time over the next week to study what we discussed in class. Next week, we’ll play a Jeopardy-style trivia game using the information they learned about the tribes and I think I’m going to buy some candy and give it to the top-scoring student!

With my BTS students, I did something a lot more advanced. The goal for the BTS students is to be able to debate about different topics- right now, their topic is social media. I wanted to do something interesting and contemporary with them, so I used SNL’s “Hashtag” video featuring Jimmy Fallon and Justin Timberlake. It was really interesting to see their reactions: some laughed, some didn’t understand the jokes, and some were completely lost. After discussing the language, the jokes, and the contemporary references (like #orangeisthenewblack), we talked about the evolution of a new language thanks to social media, such as hashtags, abbreviations (lol, brb), and different (if incorrect) ways to spell words (wut vs what). Then we talked about where this evolution of language lies in terms of advantages and disadvantages of social media. Like me, most of my students felt this evolution was a disadvantage of social media! It’s refreshing to be able to talk about more difficult subjects with them.