La semaine de la francophonie

This week was the annual francophone week at the school and the entire French department focused its efforts on celebrating la francophonie. Each class spent the week learning about the francophone world and one day was set aside to play French games.
For my three classes, I decided to teach units on francophone Africa. This actually worked out pretty well with my two high school classes, as it was easy to incorporate the theme into the units we were beginning. It helps to have a student body that lives in a francophone country, as it provides a frame of reference that can easily be related to the subject matter. We will be continuing these units well into the next month.
The middle school was another story. We had begun a unit on the household, but everything had to be put aside for the week in order to focus on our theme. This is not to say, however, that this was a lost week. The theme was geography and it was pretty easy to use this theme to teach important grammatical rules such as partitive articles. We'll get back to households next week.
One of the most fun parts of the week were the activities. The elementary school only had half days on Thursday and Friday, so the French teachers started the elementary units last week and planned the activity day for Wed of this week. I volunteered to run the jump rope race (who would have thought jumping rope was French?)and play "1,2,3 soleil!" (a French version of 1,2,3 red light) with the kindergarten and first graders. I also organized the Middle school activity day (which was today). We played the coupe de l'Afrique francophone. The seventy MS students were divided into four teams (each team had students from every French level). The students decided which francophone country their team would represent and competed in a forty minute long tournament for la coupe d'Afrique francophone. The tournament was won by la Cote d'Ivoire.

Differing Philosophies

For the most part, there is a great deal of unity and collaboration within the French department here at ISD. The teachers have established a set of rules and guidelines posted on the walls and followed in every classroom, and have adopted a common system of classroom management and discipline. For example, in every French class in the school, all students are essentially forbidden to speak English and eat or drink during class time, are allowed three bathroom passes per trimester, and receive “batons”, or strikes, for violations of classroom rules. The strikes are separated into categories and three strikes in any one category - coming to class unprepared, for example - results in a detention. The teachers also work together to create curriculum for occasions like book month, Francophone week, and Senegal month, and coolaborate to design units to input into Atlas Rubicon to be followed in the years to come.
While overall, I think the French department here is stellar, there are still some policies with which I am not quite sure that I agree. For instance, the High School students follow block schedules, so they are in French class for one hour and a half. An hour and a half is a long time to sit in a classroom, and in my opinion, if they do not get a five minute break in the middle of class, they should at least be allowed to drink water. The other thing that I have trouble with is just how adamant the teachers are about only speaking French. Most pretend not to speak English in order to prevent the students from being tempted to ask questions in English. This “French only” policy has been a source of some friction between the department and me because I allow students to approach me at the end of class and ask me things in English. I have no objection to encouraging students to speak French in class, but if I see a student struggle to understand something that I think he or she might be able to grasp if it was explained in English, I see no reason to continue to stubbornly explaining it in French.
Evidentally, I take issue with some of the rules that exist within the French department here at the school. Yet out of respect for the department, I make every effort to follow the guidelines to the letter. The students are held to the same standards with me as they are with their regualr clasroom teachers and they cannot eat, drink, or speak English during class time. However, I refuse to pretend that I do not speak English outside of class. After all, as foreign language teachers we are trying to promote the idea that speaking other languages is a positive thing. What type of message does is conveyed when someone who works at an American school refuses to speak English?

My High School Beginners' French Class

Of three classes that I took over for student teaching, the one that terrified me the most was the High School beginners’ class. It is a class of nine boys, whose ages range from fourteen to seventeen and, as one might imagine, they are not very enthusiastic about French class. Of these nine boys, there are three Americans (two of whom happen to be the US ambassador’s sons), two American-Guinean boys, an Australian, an Indian, one Lebanese, and one Swede.

When I was observing the class in the two weeks before I began teaching them, behavior problems were a constant issue. They were always blurting things out in English and talking to one another from across the room. Half of them never did homework. Two of them were really having a hard time understanding the material and one was quite frankly insolent. The only one of the bunch that was a truly serious student was the Swede. I was really worried that these boys would eat me alive.

In spite of my anxiety, I was really comfortable with the class by the second lesson. I realized that I had two advantages over my cooperating teacher. First of all, I am young male in a class full of teenage boys. This means that I can make jokes and use unorthodox methods of inciting French conversations. For example, when I used a Power Point featuring photos of famous people to teach a lesson using adjectives to describe people, I inserted a photo of the president of Senegal posing with Paris Hilton. When I asked the kids to describe Paris Hilton, it sparked a ten minute long debate about whether or not she is attractive and intelligent. If there were girls in the class, I wouldn’t have allowed the conversation to continue, but the boys were actually excited about speaking French, and as long as no one’s feelings were being hurt, I saw no reason to stop the debate. Afterwards, the classroom teacher said it was the first time she had ever seen them so eager to participate in a discussion. Another advantage to being a young male is that the kids are curious about my life, so when I used another slide show to show pictures of my family, they were truly interested and asked a lot of questions. In other words, I think they feel like they can relate to me to a certain extent.

The second advantage I have is that I coached three of them during the soccer season and I formed a good relationship with them. This, I think, helps to keep their attitudes in check. It also helps that unlike my cooperating teacher, I don’t pretend not to speak English, and on more than one occasion I’ve held kids after class to discipline them in my native tongue. Somehow, when I speak English they realize that I’m pretty serious.

Of course, my approach does have the potential to backfire. First of all, because the kids know that I speak English, they get more frustrated with me when I refuse to explain something in English. One of them insists on speaking English to me. In order to make a sort of compromise with the class, I’ve told them that they could speak to me in English after class; even if they’re getting extra help. The next potential problem is the possibility of conversation becoming inappropriate. That whole Paris Hilton business could have gotten out of hand. In order to avoid this, I need to find ways to remind the kids that just because I am young and like to joke around, I’m not their “buddy”.

I also make it a point to engage the Swedish boy. His level is already well above that of his classmates and he has many questions—some are about grammar and others are about my traveling experiences in the region. For instance, he knew that I used to use the public buses (most Westerners don’t dare to) and he wanted to know where he could catch one, how to pay, where to get out, etc. He also wanted know about taking a bus to Bamako (which I did and will never do again). The idea is that, though I have to slow the speed of the lessons down in order to make sure everyone understands the material, I do everything I can to keep the overachiever in the class from getting bored.

Wordle on your Blog

Cory, 

I created a word web (wordle) out of what you've written so far. It is a cool way to see what you've focused more on because it displays the most important/most frequently used words more prominently. It does not display common words. 

Try it yourself with some other writings you've or your students have made! 

Imagine this as a pre-reading activity: you tell students to take a look at a wordle you made out of the article they'll be reading. This could serve as an interpersonal activity that is specifically focusing on themes and topics you'll be discussing later!!

A Field Trip to Sine Saloum

A couple of weeks ago (I’m way behind on my blogging, I know) I went on a three day, two night field trip to Sine Saloum, a delta region four hours south of Dakar, with the seventh graders from ISD. The Sine Saloum region is located on the Atlantic coast where a river branches out before reaching the sea, creating a series of estuaries comprised of miles of mangrove forests and dozens of small islands. It is the most ecologically diverse area in the whole of Senegal, which is why the science teacher, who was teaching a unit about ecosystems, decided to organize the trip via a couple of Peace Corps volunteers working in the region. In total, there were thirty-one of us; twenty five students, the fore core subject teachers, my cooperating teacher and me (representing the French department). We stayed on an island in a campground/hotel made up of a bunch of small huts with a restaurant in the middle. It was really beautiful and extremely peaceful.
The planned itinerary included activities that related to every subject area and all of the teachers collaborated to create a packet that the students needed to complete and hand in a week after returning from the trip. We took pirogues through the mangrove forests, bird watching and learning about mangroves, the oysters and mussels that clung to their trunks, and why estuaries are so biologically diverse. We visited a town where Senegal’s first president was born, where Christians and Muslims live side by side, and even share the same cemetery. There was a guided star gazing session where the students learned about constellations. We were supposed to visit a fish market and learn about how fish were dried and preserved and how oysters were shipped out of the region. However, one of the pirogues capsized when pulling up to the beach, which caused us to arrive a little too late to catch the presentation. However, there were massive mounds of oyster shells at the empty market, so I seized the opportunity to explain how the oyster shells were burned and mixed with sand to make bricks for building (that was the third time I’d been to the region). Then we explored the nearby village to look at some of the buildings constructed from oyster shell bricks.
For me, the best part of the trip was when we visited a local school and conducted interviews of Senegalese students. For this, my cooperating teacher and I created a list of interview questions that the kids were required to ask. Creating the questions was difficult because there are so many levels of French speakers- from francophone to beginner- within the seventh grade. This meant we needed to come up with practical questions that would guide the students to understand a little bit about the life of the average Senegalese child, but the questions had to be written at a level that all of the kids were capable of understanding. In the end we came up with eleven questions in total. Before leaving the campground to go to the village school, we started by dividing the students by ability levels. I worked with the beginners to make sure they understood the questions. Then we placed the students in groups of three or four, with at least one student from each ability level, and instructed the students that everyone had to ask some of the questions. After all, we didn’t want to see the Francophone or the advanced kids doing all of the work. When we got to the school, we visited the classrooms and then the students came outside for the interviews. It went really well. As I circulated though the groups, I noticed that everybody participated in the discussion and that the more advanced French speakers helped the beginners understand some of what was being said and ask additional questions when they wanted more information. I think some of the answers really opened our students’ eyes to the reality of being a child in Senegal. Later, the kids worked together to make complete sentences to summarize their interview. This week, I used one of interviews to supplement a unit I’m teaching about the family to my High School beginner’s class.