Unorthodox educational strategies

January 14th

I just arrived home from my most painful lesson so far with the class from hell, to find that my skirt was tucked into my knickers. This was fine while walking through town, since I had a long coat on, but I am now feverishly wondering whether I have been showing my arse to a class of ten year olds for the past 45 minutes. Poor things. I am hoping that one of them would have mentioned something, since they usually tell me if I get chalk on myself and alert me to my faulty conjugation skills, so I can’t believe that they wouldn’t either have told me or been in such paroxysms that I would have noticed. But it is rather sobering.

In the course of that very long forty-five minutes they threw things, spilled water on the floor and then mocked one of the students for peeing herself, asked to go to the toilet every two minutes, criticised my French abilities, flatly refused to work, called me by the previous assistant’s name, told me that she had given them sweets and stuck carambars into her ringlets, and failed to keep quiet for one minute, despite this being the price I had decided to exact for playing their favourite game. Obviously they then complained piteously.

This teacher is the only one who leaves me alone for the whole lesson, despite knowing that my contract forbids this, and who then reappears to find chaos and insouciantly tells me that I should be more zen. He also said (again in front of the pupils) that I can’t send kids out of the class in case they give themselves a head injury while standing in the corridor, thus denying me my one feeble punishment option.

Last week I was invited to a teacher’s house for the first time. He comforted me by feeding me galette des rois and marrons glacés, spending at least an hour verbally eviscerating M. Laissez-Faire for incompetence, rudeness and dishonesty, and sympathising when I told him about my failures with that class. It is hard to know how much of it is my fault – maintaining discipline over 25 hyperactive children in a foreign language definitely isn’t my strong point, but in other classes the presence of the teacher, even when they sit at the back marking and ignoring proceedings, keeps a lid on the worst behaviour. With the class from hell, they know that I have no power to punish them so they run amok. It’s sad, because there are nice kids who work despite it all, try to quiet the others down and even help the weaker students when I ask them to, so I feel like I’m really letting them down. But just to blow my own trumpet a little, a teacher in my other school said that she and her colleague had agreed that I was the best assistant they had ever had, so I don’t feel that I can be entirely to blame. But let’s put that in perspective by remembering that I may have just flashed my entire class, so that praise probably isn’t saying much.