What shocks me today even more, was that their qualified teacher was not there in the classroom with me, to make sure that all went well. I was a university student, totally alone, not supported, not supervised, with dozens of 11-year-olds who knew no English. What was I to do with them? I am so angry with myself nowadays for not having stood my ground, refusing to take on this impossible role.
Each lesson took place either in a bleak classroom inside that monolithic stone building or else a kilometer or so away in a fenced in yard containing a few portable buildings.
All day long, whatever the weather, students lined up two by two in the main school courtyard, from where they were either fetched by their teachers to enter the main stone building or were supervised by the “surveillantes” as they walked back and forth between the two school locations as required by their timetable. Students wore mandatory smocks (une blouse) over their regular clothes: dark blue for the boys, white for the girls.
I was doomed to failure, and I knew it. I tried teaching the youngest children to sing “My Bonnie Lies Over the Ocean”. I encouraged those a year older to sing one of the popular songs of the time, “If You Go to San Francisco, Be Sure to Wear Flowers in Your Hair”, sung by Scott Mackenzie. I found some crêpe paper and we made garlands for their hair, so that the students could look like hippies for the school concert.
However, with an entire academic year to plan for and nothing at all in the way of support or materials, I found it very difficult to cope. Why could the headmistress and the staff not see that I wasn’t there to replace their qualified teacher? I was meant to supplement her work by conversing in English only with the older students, who had had several years of English lessons and were heading onto further studies or into the workforce. I never saw these students, not once in the year I was there. I know how my position was supposed to work: small groups of students and I, as facilitator, should have been seated in a circle in the corridor just outside the classroom, where their regular teacher would be teaching the rest of the class. She should have replaced one group with another every 20 minutes or so, for example, to give each group practice at chatting in English with me. I would have asked about their families, their lives, their hopes for the future; we could have talked about sports, pop bands, television programmes, about what they did for amusement, about their plans for the following year. None of this was possible when I was faced by an entire class of reluctant learners who knew no English.
