I know that I only updated my blog a few days ago, but that was all about being at home - well, it wasn't - it was a long-winded moan about my life in this house. That post was the result of returning to France feeling rather gloomy about spending the next 5 months here, no longer having a desire to teach and wishing that I had applied to a French university in a bigger city instead.
Life has ups and downs, we can't avoid them and this week has been a true reflection of that. As a side note, I remind myself on the bad days that, if I were in England right now, I'd be doing final year exams and in the middle of a dissertation, which to be honest, I'm glad I'm not doing. Or if I had applied to a French university, I would probably be doing exams there too.
The rest of this post will be set out in two a section for the highs and another sections for the lows of the week, that'll probably work better than just rambling my way through the days.
Lows
- I felt rather crappy about being back here, but as the week went on, I've settled back in.
- I received my Interim Report back from my supervisor which I had to send back to Leeds. My mark was surprisingly low. I've since then, asked most of my colleagues (will continue this week) for their opinion on what and how I could improve. One suggested reading French poetry out loud, another to listen to and watch more French programmes and another has arrange to chat with me every Monday lunchtime. How lovely.
- I crossed paths with my stalker today in the launderette. He asked me about why I wasn't answering his calls, I told him to bugger off. He did, eventually.
Highs
- To counterbalance the spoken French mark, I received feedback for the really tedious questionnaire I had to fill in before Christmas. I'm really pleased with the amount of corrections and the comments made; I know where I went wrong and I do plan to revise these aspects of grammar. Sightly annoying though, as usual, when I read back over what I had written, I changed a few things because I thought they were grammatically incorrect, but they weren't. I should have left them.
- My classes have gone really well this week, my favourites include the one on gender stereotyping, where we looked at an article about a little boy, Sacha, who has been raised gender-neutral. I'll be doing this lesson for the next two weeks too; I'm glad about it, I really like this class.
- Also I loved some classes where I did New Year activities. For example, I gave the students a list of 8 people and they had to complete a table of their wishes for these people's love life, health, money for 2013 and also to give them a New Year's resolution. That went okay, but it wasn't what was so amusing. Some classes then decided to make up a story using these people and when the list includes François Hollande, Marine Le Pen and Justin Bieber, you can imagine the results. One class said that Justin Bieber and Marine Le Pen would have a car accident in the same place as where Princess Diana died (just a tad sensitive) and that François Hollande saw the accident, laughed but then died because he choked on his popcorn...
- I had the first choir session of the year. I don't get such a feel-good sensation from it as I do with the choir in Leeds, but it's still good.
- I had my first taste of a galette des rois and I had the piece with the King/Queen inside. Well, actually, you could see it because of where we had sliced it, but I was given that piece anyway.
- This evening, I went to the cinema and saw The Life of Pi/L'Odyssée de Pi. It's a really good film, but I think I might have to watch it again in English, because the version I saw was dubbed (obviously) so I couldn't lip-read to help me understand. I really enjoyed looking at all the animals though, and the massive herd - what is the correct collective term? - of meerkats!
But anyway, The Show Must Go On (this just happens to be a song I'm learning with the choir here). Another week ahead of me, nothing much planned as of yet, just the demonstration I mentioned last time. Good news though, is that this term is only 7 weeks long, whereas I thought it was made up of eight weeks. Wahoo.
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