3.1 Alexander slows his roll (to an almost complete stop) in Altkirch

I accepted a post in Altkirch, France, to be an English-language assistant at Jean-Jacques Henner High School. My tenure lasts from October 2009 to May 2010, during which time I will not return to the USA barring crisis. The job is incredibly easy. Possibly too easy–ideally I’d have a job I could invest more of myself in. I work twelve hours a week, spread out over four days. My role is to help the students with their accent in and usage of the English language. I’m also supposed act as a sort of cultural ambassador.

My first week on the job was spent going to the classes and answering questions. Highlights: “Do you know Michael Jeckson?” (Answer: Not personally.) “Do you have an American girlfriend?” (Answer: Complicated question. I guess not.) “Could you tell us a little bit about the race situation in the American South?” (Answer: It’s not as bad as you think. Except kind of it is in a lot of ways.) “Why did Obama win the Nobel Peace Prize when the US is still involved in two wars?” (Answer: Uh, it’s complicated.) “Why did the Americans put all the Indians on reservations?” (Answer: HOW ABOUT WE TALK ABOUT ALGERIA INSTEAD.)

For one of the classes, they asked me if I knew any French songs. I said yes (I actually listen to quite a bit of French music). They asked me to sing a song to them in French. So I sang them the first verse and the chorus of Chantal Goya’s “Un Lapin,” a well-known children’s song about how, one morning, a rabbit kills a hunter. Goya is famous for making floppy bunny-ears with her hands by holding two fingers up on each side of her head and then bringing them up and down alternately in time with the song, so I did this as I sang. The kids were really annoyed–I guess it’s the equivlalent of if a foreigner came to a tenth grade class and sang mockingly the Skidda-ma-rinka-dinky-dink song, or some other embarrassing, nationally-specific relic of a less sophisticated time. That’s what they get for trying to find a way to make fun of my accent, the bastards. (The students make fun of my accent with surprising frequency, especially when I make them say French loanwords like croissant with an American accent. To French people, apparently American English sounds like roshroshroshroshrararosh.)

I guess that last paragraph makes it sound like I’m the hapless butt of the high-schoolers’ contempt, but really it’s not like that at all–I‘ve never had my accent made fun of in anything but good humor, for instance. It’s actually really easy to gain the social upper hand when you are the only one who speaks the language fluently (also, being a 22-year-old among 16-year-olds helps?). You never get flustered and say something stupid or undignified when you’re speaking as if to a four-year-old. After the initial week I started receiving students in small groups, sized two to ten students, and I would have to make conversation with them. I understand them when they talk amongst themselves, but they have trouble understanding me, and formulating responses is difficult for them. So it’s pretty easy to stay in control of the situation. Plus, since I have most of them in small groups for a limited period of time, discipline problems are extremely rare. So it’s cool. Except the conversations are excruciating.

Typical conversation:

Me: “How are you guys doing today?”

Students: “…”

Me: “Do you understand? I asked, How are you guys doing today?”

Students (amongst themselves): “quoi alors, ca veut dire quoi?”

Me: “How. Are. You. Guys. Doing. Today.”

Student: “Yes.”

Me: “No. I ask you this every god-damn time you see me. I asked, How are you? Do you understand? In French: Ca va?.”

Students: “Ohhhhhh! Good.”

Me: “Okay. Have we talked about vacations yet?”

Students: “Yes.”

Me: “Have we talked about French holidays?”

Students: “Yes.”

Me: “Have we talked about sports?”

Students: “Yes.”

Me: “God damn it! Hobbies?”

Students: “Yes.”

Me: “Types of music?”

Students: “No.”

Me: “Fantastic!  Now we’re all going to go around in a circle and one after the other talk about our favorite type of music. You first.”

Student 1: “I like the rock musique. It ease ritmic.”

Me: “What is your favorite band?”

Student 1: “…ze Bittles.”

Me: “Cool. And you? What is your favorite type of music?”

Student 2: “I like the rock musique as well.”

Me: “And what do you like about it? Why do you like rock music so much, as opposed to other types of music?”

Student 2: “Uh. It ease ritmic.”

Me: “Anything else?”

Student 2: “I like ze Bittles.”

So, twelve hours a week of making conversation with people at a low level of English. The hardest part is that there really isn’t much to say. An organic conversation is impossible. So I just ask questions. And if I ask questions to the class in general, either nobody responds or the same student responds over and over. So I ask everyone the same question one at a time, and riff off an answer if it is interesting enough to merit discussion (this happens infrequently). Sometimes I literally run out of things to say and stare out the window for a minute or so. The nice thing is that it doesn’t matter. Considering I’m in charge of a group of people, this job is surprisingly stress-free.

Sometimes I use study aids. One of the classes was talking about advertisements, so for that class I brought American advertisements I printed off the internet. One of these was for the Wendy’s baconator. “The new baconator. Careful: it senses fear.” I explained the jokes to them (baconator as in Terminator or gladiator, sensing fear like wild animals are said to be able to). One of the girls then had a fit of hysterical laughter. She could not stop laughing, for maybe five minutes, and as there were only four students this was so disruptive I couldn’t continue. She was laughing so hard she was crying. I said, “Tell me what is so funny!” and she was like, “Baconator!” And I started laughing too, because it is pretty funny.

It’s strange to be back at a high school. The building itself is very similar to American high schools. There are lockers, but they are more like cubbies, and instead of lining the halls they get their own coves here and there. Teacher’s don’t work all day like in the US, and therefore they don’t get their own rooms. So barring some posters sometimes, the classrooms are really bleak and institutional. And the students between classes are pretty awful, clogging up the hallways and milling around and moving in flows through too-narrow hallways. I avoid the halls between classes if I can. Also, PDA is pretty out of control. I think I’ve become an old fuddy-duddy, but there it is: I do not like encountering high school students eating each other’s faces. In college when people made out, at parties or whatever, I didn’t think twice about it. But I get visible uncomfortable encountering the high schoolers doing it. Now that I think about it, I think I would have been equally uncomfortable at Rice if in Rayzor or something in the middle of the day I encountered two people making out hardcore on a bench. Whatever, who cares.

It’s strange to see everything from a teacher’s perspective–from time to time I sit in on classes taught in English, answering questions and helping the students with their responses and such. I was a really bright high schooler, and I figured that I was something special to the teachers–of course they have a special interest in me: I’m a special person! Even if I always copy my homework, and only do enough work to maintain my 4.0 and not a bit more, and am actually kind of disrespectful sometimes, they love me anyway! I guess I always knew in the back of my mind that that assumption was not reasonable, but it wasn’t something I really thought through because I frankly don’t think about my high school teachers’ opinions of me very often. Well, standing in front of a class and not being a part of it, I realized that teachers view classes as collective bodies, like a swarm of bees. It doesn’t matter if you’re Albert Einstein–you’re still just one of a mass, and once you‘re finished brilliantly answering the question you recede back into the group, and no matter how smart you are it’s still irritating when you chat. I chatted a lot in high school. No wonder I got some relatively mediocre teacher recommendations! (I’m not kidding, I got my hands on one or two of them after I finished applying to colleges, though to be fair the two I saw were from the teachers I would expect to be least likely to write me a good recommendation.). Also: teachers can overhear you when you talk amongst yourselves! Even if you whisper! I guess with larger classes it isn’t as easy, but with my groups, even up to seven to ten students, I can hear and understand every word. It’s a pretty horrifying thought, from the perspective of the student. And I can see it makes the students uneasy when I acknowledge what they didn‘t intend me to hear (usually they are asking each other how to say something, or prompting each other).

Anyway, so that’s my job. I probably spend more hours per week lounging around in the bathtub than I do at work.

Which brings me to my daily life. I currently live in an apartment on campus. It has two stories (on top of a garage), and for the most part I have it all to myself. It isn’t really an apartment as much as a duplex whose other half is unoccupied. So I can pretty much do whatever I want. Three days or so a week, a commuting philosophy teacher stays too. She’s cool. But usually I’m alone. This has its advantages: I can shower whenever, and watch TV at whatever volume, and have little private dance parties in the kitchen when a song I like comes on as I’m cooking dinner. But a problem is that I’m ALWAYS alone. There are other assistants in Mulhouse, a larger (maybe Mobile-sized) city a ten or twenty minute train ride away. But the last train leaves at 8pm, so for me doing anything at night is really inconvenient, especially if I have work the next day (though I only work twelve hours a week, I have 8am classes three days a week). So effectually I don’t have much of a social life outside of work and my sometimes roommate. So what do I do with all my time? Oh, well, lots of stuff. I take baths, I read, I read while taking baths, I watch TV, I play FreeCell (I currently have a 71-game win-streak, by the way. Jealous? Don’t be.), I watch a pot of water until it boils and then I make instant chicory coffee and drink it while staring into middle-distance, I do the dishes, I eat crates of Clementine oranges while leaning on the doorjamb, I make French flashcards but then don‘t study them, I stand in my backyard for a minute and then come back in, I study for the GRE with a book someone left in my house, even though I only plan to go out for an MFA and my GRE score won’t really matter. The girl (I assume she’s female) who lived in the apartment before me left a couple of books and some movies, so I’ve watched Jackie Brown like three times, one in English and twice in French, and Mallrats (in French: Les Glandeurs) maybe five times. Mallrats reminds me uncannily of my own time in high school–how they dress, how they talk, the jokes they make. Whenever I watch The Breakfast Club, when Molly Ringwald hesitates before going to smoke pot with the rebel character, I always shout, “Don’t do it! It’s the mind-killer!” It gets funnier each time (it actually does). Once I read, in a weekend, the three final books of the Twilight series. Because I had nothing better to do!

To be fair, I have also been writing a lot. I’m really pleased with myself, since I’ve been making excuses for as long as I can remember as to why I don’t write often (I hate my job too much to think of writing! School is too hard to think of writing! I don’t have any privacy now! My laptop doesn’t work!). But now I’ve been working pretty consistently. I might start working on a novel (a startling roman a clef that depicts everyone I’ve ever known negatively, and also features sexually-active teenaged vampires!). Just kidding. But seriously, I need to write a bestseller real quick so I never need to work a job I hate again (I‘m refering to any and all food service positions, not my current job). If only the US had jobs where you get paid a living wage working twelve hours a week asking people what exactly St. Catherine’s Day is, and why we celebrate it!

Anyway, I’m currently trying to move to Mulhouse. It would be drastically more expensive (my current rent is super-cheap, by the way), and my commute would become thousand-fold more hassly (no more rolling out of bed, washing my face, putting on a sweater, and rushing to class five minutes late), but I’d get a social life, internet, and–God willing–a quirky, charming, Audrey-Tatou-type downstairs neighbor that likes playing guitar on the fire escape and needs someone to teach her how to love. Also, I could ride a bike, since they have a city-wide bike-rental infrastructure like in Paris (it’s called Velocite in Mulhouse, the French word for bike being velo. Isn’t that clever? I do think so. Though maybe not, since both words share the same etymological root. Zing!). Riding bikes is just about one of my favorite things to do, especially when each time it’s free the first half hour after paying a $25 yearly subscription.