March 18, 2021

Thursday

Catherine A picked me up around 8am. The morning was really chilly, so I had to dig my winter coat out again. Even though it was early, the wind was already picking up.

I started off the day by talking about LA with the 4eme class. They were really only interested in hearing about Hollywood. We watched some movie trailers and they learned about the Oscars. For some reason, my students are having a really hard time understanding the concept of states. It is so frustrating! France is also divided into regions and departments, so I don’t get why they can’t grasp that the United States is as well. They also don’t understand how much smaller France is compared to the US. Every week I tell them that France is smaller than Texas and sure enough, every week they freak out when I tell them.

With Noury’s 5eme, we also worked on LA. They really liked it because the recognized all of the sights from GTA. All of them are very passionate about video games and recognized it immediately.

At the break, everyone sat and talked about the rising number of COVID cases. I’m still shocked by the apparent lack of concern amongst the French for rising case numbers. Things continue to get worse here and there have been huge problems with the vaccine rollout. There seems to be an epidemic at my school and kids are getting sent home every day. Yet, the teachers are just annoyed they’re not allowed to use the break room table because three people got COVID while eating at it.

With Catherine’s 5eme group I discussed St. Patrick’s day. They told me that they do not celebrate at all in France. It seems to be true, there are no decorations and I haven’t seen any party items in stores. They were amazed that we dye the Chicago river green. Many students were concerned about the fish. Others remarked “oh- isn’t that polluting? you do that on purpose?”

When I went back to their classroom I noticed that they had celebrity biographies hung on the wall. Most of them were stars from Riverdale. They’re obsessed with media about American high schools.

The 6eme group at the end of the day made my life easy. They were doing presentations of their research projects. Each of them had a place in the English speaking world and was supposed to show us around the place through their presentation. We got to learn about Las Vegas, South Dakota, and Hawai’i.

Catherine took me back to my apartment after class. I got to chat with a friend while I ate lunch and then took a nap before my tutoring appointment.

Nawel picked me up at 2:30 and we drove to the store together. We went shopping and talked about products in the store. I picked up a book and some wine for the weekend. The lesson was spent mostly going over things we’d talk about in daily life. I thought it was nice because I didn’t get to learn a lot of that when I was studying French and it’s some essential stuff. Nawel carries her black notebook around and writes new words and phrases in it so she can go over it later. While I don’t think the other shoppers were thrilled with this, I think it’s a good strategy to have.

I was reading Twitter when I got. home and I saw that there would be an announcement soon by the government regarding increased COVID cases. There was a general assumption that the government would reconfine the regions in red.

I made myself a little pizza for dinner. I got to have a phone call with my mom and my friend Anna before bed. It was a pretty good day overall.