School!

Thought you lovely people might be interested in the school I am working at! Here is the website... and if you can't be bothered to click that, a couple of pictures :)

Ecole d'Youville

Ecole Lambert

The school is split into two sites (d'Youville and Lambert, if you'd not guessed) about a five-minute walk away from each other in the town of Saint-Joseph-de-Beauce, which in turn is about half an hour away from where I live. A fun fact about this journey is that me and another assistant from St-G are on the Special Bus hahaha.. but only on the way there! So I'm a special kid only half the time.. the other half I am that massive loser nobody wants to talk to on the normal (massive, yellow, summer camp-y) school bus. Obviously I do a lot for my image on said bus by knitting, reading (I'm literally a reading machine at the moment, it's AWESOME, more on this another time) and writing postcards to those I miss.. if you didn't get a card yet I either didn't get round to you yet or secretly hate you! Whichever works best for you ;)

Anyway, I am working at both schools - mainly due to my mentor only working part time, I'm not quite ready to be left to my own devices just yet! The school timetable throughout the whole of Beauce is a 9-day rotation not including weekends, of which I always have Day 8 as an extra day off. This could harbour great roadtrip potential if any of the other assistants also had day 8 off, but unfortunately ours don't co-ordinate at all! This means that on days 1, 3, 5 and half of 7 I'm at d'Youville (years 1-3) and days 2, 4, 6, the other half of 7 and 9 I'm at Lambert (years 4-6). It has taken a bit of getting used to with all this changing and age-range variety, but if there is something I've learnt throughout my time in work, mixing things up a little bit is the best tool to keep my interest anyway ;) also, due to much pre-Christmas luck on my part, from now until the start of 2013 I have about four four-day weekends to fill which is awesome! Let's just hope the snow holds off a little so I can get out to where I plan to visit safely and easily... (Ottawa/Gatineau, somewhere on the Gaspesie (probably Rimouski) and Montreal again if you're interested to know!)

Saint-Joseph

This brings me to initiation, something which is very common here, and therefore perhaps something subsequent assistants might like to be somewhat prepared for ;) - out of the five assistants based in Saint-Georges I think three had to do some kind of silly task or presentation, as a way of initiating themselves into the school. After spending the last two years being amongst the incredibly genuine but rather staid Germans, having to dress up on a whim was somewhat more of a surprise to me! However the theme was certainly to my taste (see Beard Night 1 and 2 in Previous Life Activities), in that we had to wear a moustache all day to honour the principal's, which is like nothing you've ever seen! Never thought I would be completing Beard Night 3 in the daytime, at some school in eastern Canada, but there you go! On a related note, various sneaky principal moustache pics to be uploaded throughout the year due to its' majesty...

Fitting in wi't'locals

After wearing my moustache all day (as well as a T-shirt letting the whole world know that I'm new.. luckily there were lots of other new people too so I didn't feel too weird!) myself and the other newbies/older staff met promptly after the bell at 3pm, in order to drink beers, eat nachos and present ourselves to one another. As the idea of standing up and talking French in front of a large group was utterly terrifying, I adapted an English slideshow I'd made for the students about my life in the UK/Germany, using Powerpoint. That meant I could get it all corrected beforehand, and say exactly what I wanted to day without getting tongue-tied ;) woohoo!

Powerpoint Wanker 2012

Something worth mentioning here would be the French, which I am finding rather difficult - the Beauce accent is... interesting, to say the least! I am completely lacking the easy start I encountered in Germany, and often have this feeling that my brain is actually expanding, which is hard to explain. I guess I am being quickly and fully immersed in a little corner of Canada, where more people don't speak English than do, so it's absolutely going to feel strange and maybe even a bit stressful at points. There is this pre-conception (thought also, until quite recently, by myself to some degree) that all people in Quebec are completely bi-lingual.. but I can honestly say in Beauce this is absolutely NOT THE CASE as it would be in bigger cities. Luckily, I am also simultaneously aware that it will be worth it in the end, I'm just interested to see the direction my pretty elementary French will take ;) will I come back with a Beauce accent?!

Think that's it for now... thanks for reading :)

xo

Ps. Goodness me, five million !!!!s.. if you're worrying that Canada somehow made me eager about life, don't despair, I still hate everything, I was just trying to get this done whilst I still had the motivation (therefore with very limited editing time).. saying that it would probably have taken less time to edit them out than type this, live and learn...