here are a couple of little things in my daily life you might like to know:
EATING
it's becoming easier. the school has a decent cafeteria. i bought a "carte de cantine" to use for lunches. i prepaid 20 euros on the card which should give me about 11 lunches; a pretty good price considering that every meal usually comes with a main course of meat and veggies, salads, fruits, yogurt, cheese, bread and sometimes pudding.
each day the teachers enter a special door into the cafeteria, cut in line in front of hungry students, swipe our cards to get a tray, then eat in a separate teachers' room. we can have water or wine to drink. and the food isn't terrible. it beats the usual cafeteria fare you see in the states. maybe we really are eating grade D meat, but they season it well and there's always a lot of tasty sauce. it's a great option for me. lunch is one hour.
THE TEACHERS' LOUNGE
it's where i am now. it's a beautiful, echoey room with 25-foot ceilings, crown mouldings, arched windows, 6 or 7 computers with internet access, a coffee/espresso/hot chocolate machine (it's just ok; i usually get hot chocolate and it's pretty syrupy and somewhat salty), cubby holes for each teacher, a lounge area, the copy machine, big desks, etc. it's a lovely room and it's where everyone congregates during breaks.
SCHOOL
classes begin at 8 am; the last class begins at 5pm. most classes last an hour. the students are free to leave school if they have an open period. most teachers are required to work about 15 hours per week, but classes are a lot harder than in the states and much more is demanded from the students, hence, the teachers have a lot of work to do outside of class: preparing lessons, grading papers and tests, working with students in groups, etc. (so i think the outside work evens out the at-school work in terms of hours. most people in france only work about 35 hours per week anyway. and there are tons of vacations... maybe they're onto something...)
apparently i am at one of the better schools in the area in terms of organization and success rates. most kids here pass the BAC, which is the huge test they must take to graduate. if they don't pass they must repeat their final year until they do. a few of my students are 19 years old and repeating their last year.
there are three grades here; seconde (sophomore), premier (junior) and terminale (senior). i will mostly work with seconde and premier.
students can study englisg, spanish, german, chinese and russian. there are assistants like me for everything except chinese.
c'est tout pour maintenant!
ps, the language thing is becoming a tiny bit easier every day. but after spending the whole weekend with angela speaking english... it took me a couple of hours to get back into the swing of french!