Qu'est-ce que c'est Thanksgiving?

My teaching in France has been a far cry from teaching high school English. I feel like I'm only just now starting to actually teach, and I've been here for nearly two months!

During the first few weeks, I introduced myself and observed each of the different classes for about an hour. I'm working in nine classrooms in three different schools, so there is a lot of variety in classroom behavior and English proficiency. For example, at one of the schools there are several kids from American and British families and even though I'm used to working with bilingual kids at the ISA, I'm still blown away by a child's ability to master languages. However, in other classes, it's a struggle just to get them to distinguish between the French pronunciation of spider (since they know Spiderman) and the English pronunciation of spider. They struggle with the long 'i' sound and have the typical francophone tendency to put more emphasis on the last syllable of a word, so the English pronunciation of spider becomes 'spee-DAIR.' They're making some progress, but there's only so much I can do when I'm only in the classroom for an hour, thirty minutes with one group and then thirty minutes with another.

 
 

images via pinterest

Most of my lessons so far have revolved around Halloween. After teaching the same two or three lessons nine times over the course of three weeks, I am so burned out on Halloween! The French have started celebrating the holiday over the past ten years or so, but their schema of Halloween costumes is limited to the scary. When I showed the two kids from my host family some of the typical kid Halloween costumes, their reactions were quite hilarious: "C’est nul, ça!" roughly translating to "Well that's useless/What's the point of that?" Why wear a princess or superhero costume when Halloween is supposed to be scary? However, I learned that the French dress up in costumes during the Carnival season before Mardi Gras, so there you have it.

Thanksgiving is an entirely different matter. The kids and the teachers know next to nothing about the history and traditions, so I've had the rough task of historian thrust on me. Luckily I brought along a couple of books with illustrations that have helped me to explain pilgrims, the Mayflower, the New World, Squanto, etc. A few of the sharper kids have asked me why the pilgrims and Native Americans are friends in the story of Thanksgiving when they actually fight and kill each other -- that hypocrisy is hard enough to explain in English already, but I'm doing the best I can. 

Me circa 1994 (?) -- An elementary Thanksgiving

Talking about the current Thanksgiving traditions has been more lighthearted. Everyone loves to discuss food, but apparently pumpkin pie is not a typical dessert. I showed them a picture of a pumpkin pie and had them guess what kind of pie it was.

- Tarte aux pommes?
- Tarte au citron?
- Des mandarines?
- Des abricots?
- Tarte aux cérises?

They know not the deliciousness of all things pumpkin-flavored, peuchères. 

I'm going to have some Thanksgiving desserts with the American family on Wednesday and hopefully have a Thanksgiving get-together with the other language assistants in Pierrelatte. I wish I could have some of Mimi's delicious mashed potatoes too, but that will have to wait.

La nature -- Caves & Canyons

I spent the latter part of my Toussaint vacation exploring more of what Ardeche has to offer, including the caves and canyons just a short drive away from Bourg-St-Andeol. 

I could only describe it all as beautiful. The autumn colors were new to me (things pretty much just stay green in Arizona, except for a handful of trees) and although I have been to the Grand Canyon a few times, I found the Ardeche canyons equally fascinating. 

This cave looked like a mouth with a single tooth.

I stopped to take a picture of the ground because I liked the holes...

and then lodged my foot in a hole, tripped, and snapped this picture just as M. T was telling the kids to watch their step so that they didn't get their foot stuck in a hole. Oops.

The caves -- flashlight/headlamp required! Claustrophobia highly discouraged!

No Fraggle sightings. :(

A view from up high.

French Music Friday -- Vol. 2: Pascal Parisot

The other day P (the 7 1/2 year-old daughter of M. T and Mme. T) wanted to show me some of the CDs and books she "used to" listen to when she was "little." First we listened to a book on CD of The Little Mermaid and I was seriously confused because the ending was different both from the original Hans Christian Andersen ending and the Disney version. In her version, after the prince leaves the little mermaid for another woman, the king destroys the sea witch so that the spell on the little mermaid is broken. She ends up going back to live with her mermaid family and marrying a sea prince! I didn't even think of that as an option. Are there other endings I don't know about?

Anyway, after that I was introduced to the French version of Raffi -- Pascal Parisot. Rest assured that I showed the kids "Bananaphone" and "Down by the Bay" afterward, but Pascal Parisot definitely gives Raffi a run for his money.

My favorites were "Les poissons panes" (fishsticks), "Mes parents sont bio" (roughly translating to "My parents are organic/only eat organic"), and "Tu chantes comme une casserole" (you sing terribly/like a casserole). Unfortunately, his songs haven't yet taken youtube by storm, so the video I'm posting is a mishmash of songs he played for a concert for little kids. He plays "Tu chantes comme une casserole" towards the end at least.

I couldn't find a video of my favorite of him singing the songs ("Mes parents sont bio"), but I did find this charming video of a French dad singing it with his kids behind him. At the end the kids come out and make comments about how their dad clearly does not eat all organic and even gets burgers at Quick (Quelle horreur!) and then he calls them "fils indignes" (indignant sons). I have a feeling it's staged, but quite cute all the same.

Rennes

I only spent one day in Rennes, so I have much fewer photos. Not that that's much of an excuse. Hopefully I"ll be going back sometime soon so that I can take more pictures and eat more crepes.

I'm quickly coming to the conclusion that French cities are required to have a carousel, which reminds me of this (I've had Improv Everywhere on the brain since I'm planning on showing this for one of my English conversation workshops with the teachers).

We spent much of the day at the Bretagne historical museum. My favorite part was a room where you could put on a pair of headphones and listen to fairytales in several different French dialects. I could have stayed in there all day.

Ancient coins

Tweezers

In the museum

Again with the mannequins -- these ones were faceless and I'm still not sure if that makes me more or less creeped out.

Why is it called the Palais de Tokyo?

While in Paris, we visited the modern art museum at the Palais de Tokyo and although I wasn't very impressed with their collection overall, I did find a few things that I liked. 

For one thing, there were groups of kids in the museum taking part in a sort of "art camp" where they learned about the different types of paintings and got to make a little art book as they went along. It was quite adorable.

Neat Eiffel Tower painting

My favorite color is yellow, in case you weren't aware.

In Ardeche there are wild boars called sangliers (kind of like the javelinas back home). This painting of one seriously creeped me out, not only because it's pretty gruesome, but also because I had already seen a dead sanglier on the back of someone's car. After I got back from vacation, I saw another dead one in a rowboat that three guys were taking down the Ardeche canyons and then later another sanglier ran across the highway in front of our car. That's three sanglier sightings in one month!

I didn't care very much for most of Bernard Buffet's paintings because they seemed like animation from a Tim Burton film but more gruesome. I did like this homage to Francoise Hardy though.

The most entertaining/odd part of the museum was a 90 minute video they had playing of a man sitting at a desk smashing objects with a large rock. We only started watching it toward the end, so you can see what a mess there was.

The rock

Here is a quick video I took of a portion of the film. If I recall correctly, it was aptly titled Smashing.