The thing about Thursdays...

Last year, when my friend Kim was on exchange, I remember she said she really, really liked Thursdays because she had class all day and it felt like the most "normal" (American) of her work days. I work all day Thursday and I hate it. I have a class in the morning that's two hours long, and they sit in utter silence and refuse to speak. Today we listened to an interview of a girl who went to high school in Paris and then in Boston, and she talked about the American style of teaching, how it's discussion-based, and the teacher guides the conversation but most of the learning and talking comes from the students. This is a sharp contrast to the French system, which is mostly lecture-based, where the teacher provides all the answers and the students copy them down and memorize them.

Here's the core of the problem: I can't teach in the French style, and they can't handle the American style. They get nervous when I walk around the room; they refuse to admit when they don't understand something I've said; if they ask a question like "What is the reason for uniforms in American schools?" and I do the American teacher thing of saying, "Well, what do you think some reasons are?" they stare at me in shame and horror like they've done something wrong. As far as I can tell, "thinking for oneself" is not a concept that's arrived in the French educational system.

I honestly don't know how to deal with this. At the end of two hours, I thought I might lock myself in a bathroom and cry for a while. Instead I went down to the teachers' room, and when some of my colleagues asked how things were going, I made the mistake of telling them: not very well. They want to be sympathetic, I think, but it's clear they don't quite understand what's bothering me. I'm used to knowing my students, to seeing their personalities, to interacting with them, cracking jokes with them. That doesn't happen here. The kids want nothing to do with me beyond my services as a living French-English dictionary (and God forbid I should fail them in this capacity).

I had three more classes this afternoon; the first was painful (I tried a French-style lesson and was bored to tears), the second was okay (I tried an American-style lesson and it was mostly lost on them), and the third I knew in advance would be blah and I was not disappointed. At the end of the day, I am exhausted, defeated and wondering how many days are left in the school year*. I know things will get better, I know they will, but in the meantime I'm not gonna lie: it's rough out here.

*165.