ORIENTATION

So now I’m supposed to know what I’m doing?  Think again.  On October 9^th there was  an all day orientation for all of the English assistants teaching college and lycee (middle and high school).  It started at 9am and was scheduled to run until 5pm.  We were supposed to get a better handle on what exactly our responsibilities are, who we can contact for advice and help, and what it means to be a French citizen.  As me what, who, or how…and I couldn’t give you an answer!  It was great to meet a bunch more assistants because I had, as it turned out, only met a handful.  There was even a girl who went to Riverdale high school who knew a bunch of the same people.  We spent the morning going through topics such as social security, salary, health care, finding an apartment, paying rent, opening up a bank account…etc.  Important topics but unfortunately the questions and the explanations began to contradict themselves and the whole morning became quite confusing.  We broke for lunch around noon and it was free for us.  We ate in the canteen of the high school where we had our meeting (an experience I don’t necessarily need to do again).  It was one of those grab a tray, glass, and silverware and chose one from each section – yogurt, pasta or salad, mystery meet and fries.  During the afternoon we were split into groups specific to our job assignments and started the afternoon learning about the school system we were going to be a part of.  To my knowledge we were supposed to be learning about how to structure our classes and how to go about working with the kids however the guy who we were working with just decided to explain the system (that was actually in a book that we were given) and he spent and hr and 45 minutes doing so.  He then said that the internet is the best resource for anything that we would need and he suggested to go look anything up on google like icebreakers or games.  Humorous.  Good news is we got out quite early, bad news is that it was quite entirely pointless except for the opportunity to meet some other awesome assistants.