By Request: A Day in the Life of Lycée Aristide Maillol

A view of the Pyrenees from my school.


Apparently, the fame of my blog has been spreading, and it’s being translated into 19 different languages (just kidding). But, by my readers’ request, here is an insight into the more pedagogical aspects of my time abroad. And here, I thought you all just wanted to know the differences between the American and French versions of McDonald’s. Seriously, what kind of Americans are you?

To respond to one of my earlier posts about peer pressure in France, I must say that there is (of course) more than that one difference between American and French students. For starters, the French education system is nearly impossible to understand. Instead of the basic four-year, get all your requirements out of the way, and play sports on the side mentality that we have in the States, for French students, school is genuinely hard work – much like the American university system. They must choose their “track,” whether it is “S” (Sciences), “ES” (Economics, Business, and Social Sciences), or “L” (Language, Literature, Humanities).

From there, they spend their four years working towards the difficult Baccalauréat (the BAC) exam that is a week-long intensive exam of every subject they have taken. Yikes. Some fail and have to re-take their senior year (called a “belle année,” or beautiful year…heh). If they pass that exam, they have several choices: a) leaving school and getting a job; b) going to the university; c) staying at the high school and getting their BTS degree (not really sure what an American equivalent would be – it’s higher than an AA/AS degree, but…different somehow); d) staying at the high school and working towards entering the Grandes Ecoles (we don’t have an equivalent, but it’s a specialized school for certain subjects that was started by Napoleon).

The students I am teaching are the equivalent of high school sophomores, juniors, seniors, and I do have some of the BTS students who have already passed the BAC. They are students from all tracks; some are studying science, many are studying business, and (sadly) few are studying in the humanities.

In a typical class session, I take half of a regular class. I’ll have anywhere between six and sixteen rambunctious high school kids for about 45 minutes. Luckily, I don’t have to grade anything that they produce, so my job is just to have fun with them and get them speaking English.

For the older students who are working towards the BAC, I am more serious. I’ll bring in documents similar to what they will have on their exam at the end of the year, and we work with it just as they will for the test. Not as much fun, but they are serious students and take it seriously.

For the younger students, I typically share cultural aspects with them. Since, like most teenagers, they love music, I’ll bring in lyrics to songs. We’ll go through the lyrics line-by-line so that they understand what is going on, and then I play the song at the end. They really like that activity.

Other times, I’ll bring in fun news articles I find. I found one on a soup kitchen that opened for dogs in Germany, and we read that as a class and discussed it. I think they had fun talking about how silly a soup kitchen for dogs was during a time of financial difficulty. Each class that worked with that article spent the hour with crinkled up foreheads, and saying “Je ne comprends pas…” (I just don’t understand).

One of my favorite activities began as an impromptu idea. I have pictures with me of Oregon and the Pacific Northwest, so I handed out a picture to each student with the instruction not to let anyone else see it. They then had five minutes or so to write sentences describing the picture. Then, when they were finished, they stood up and read their sentences one by one. After each sentence, the class had to draw what was said. We’d then share our pictures (I’m a lousy artist, which makes them feel better) and laugh and giggle. It turns out to be a lot of fun!

So that’s a brief idea of what I have been doing in the classroom and the history that the students bring to each class session. They are really a fun set of kids, but they have an incredible responsibility regarding their studies that is hard for Americans to understand. Suffice it to say that I’m glad I didn’t have to go through it, and I applaud them for the diligent work they do every day.