Day 2: Well, that was quick.

Friday is my big day: one whole class. There was an eensy bit of chaos at the beginning, because the class (in the French sense, a classe is a group of students who follow the same program of study) was split between my colleague and me. The problem was, no one knew which group belonged to which teacher or which of the two classrooms they should report to. Since I only had five girls turn up, we all walked to the next building to Stéphane's group, where he and I arbitrarily divided them (he took the top half of the alphabet, I took the bottom) and that was that.

They were nice kids, but I'd been warned that they were not very motivated and would be quick to take advantage, so I was watching them pretty closely. At the end of class, they have five minutes to copy down notes from the board, and after that they're free to chat. Some teachers dismiss a few minutes early; most wait for the bell. One boy copied no notes, waited a few minutes, then stood up and walked towards the door. I put the smackdown on that, then capped it with the American teacher trick of making him wait until everyone else left class first before finally dismissing him. I love power.

Thus, at 8:55 my day was officially over, but I stuck around to discuss my progress with Cécile, do some planning, make some copies, that kind of thing. Then I jumped online to look at the bus schedule; there was a bus in eight minutes and nothing else for an hour, so my options were to dash towards the bus stop or get comfortable. I wanted a nap, so I went to get my coat but I ran into Stéphane. At this point, I had to make a judgment call: excuse myself and get the bus, or make an attempt at socializing.

A or B? Make your guess now. I'll wait.

All right, are you ready? The truth is... that I sacrificed my nap in order to stay and chat. Shocking, I know. You all know how I feel about naps. This should be a clear indication of my need for human company. (It might also have to do with the fact that Stéphane is young, male, and not unattractive.) It turned out to be a good/bad decision; a few minutes into our conversation, a band of English teachers from the vocational school came in and the next thing I knew French was flying all over the place, everybody was talking at once and I had no idea what the crap was going on. There was something about a nature show on TV, something about the cost of plasma televisions and their consumption of electricity, and something about the vocational kids listening to too much rap music and convincing themselves they are victims of society. And when I say "something about," I do not mean that I'm summarizing things for you; I mean this is a full transcript of everything I was able to grasp.

Then I walked home (because there was no bus for another 40 minutes) and took a nap. A long one. And it was fantastic.

As for tonight's agenda... well, I'll tell you about it later. Let's just say fingers crossed that I don't make a total fool of myself (or, fingers crossed that I do, because it makes for a more interesting story).