Halfway

It's mid-January. I've been here 3 1/2 months. I have 3 1/2 months to go. Weird.

Finally completed my medical visit today (2nd try). Sitting in the waiting room with 6 other English assistants, I asked how everyone was liking work. We looked tired, a bit at the end of our ropes, and it's only halfway through. We love living in Europe. But, this job is proving to be a bit (quite a bit) different than we expected.

(photo: I got my own copy of one of these today)

Slow paperwork. Unappreciative students. Absent teachers. Where's the challenge, the excitement, the "job well done!"? In some other country, obviously. In France, the challenge is to earn the respect of your peers and students, to energize a class of sixteen 16-year-olds who sit in class from 8 a.m. to 6 p.m. and are unaware that high school is anything other than a drudgery of tests and homework (where are the school sports teams, drama club, student government?).

The first month or two was exciting. We were the "new guy" that everybody was curious about at school. Students paid attention to us because they had to get used to our accents. Things may not have been perfect, but we had the promise of the months to come to look forward to.

But now we're halfway through. And things haven't gotten much better. Maybe you could say we're more "French," experiencing this lack of communication between ourselves and the teachers. Or simply that people around school have gotten used to seeing us (in particular, students), so we're not someone to care about anymore.

It could just be the mid-winter slump. After all, the Lyonnais don't know what to do with all the snow this year--buses have stopped running, so students have stopped coming to school and half the teachers have about given up; meanwhile, my Canadian friends are snickering at the sorry excuse for snow.

Who knows what it is. I don't have much hope of things improving; sadly, if I remind myself that I'm in a "secondary" position, where people mostly don't know what to do with me (as an assistant, and as an expat), then it's not so bad. And thanks to the new stamp on my passport, I can prove that I am tuberculosis-free :)