Les Ecoles

With our third week of school coming to an end I thought this would be a good time to give some of our first impressions of the schools so far.

First off, when we registered at both schools, we were handed a list of all of the supplies we would need to get and let me tell you, parents buy EVERYTHING here, except the textbooks. I have spent 200-300 Euros just on school supplies alone. The upside to this however, is that I have noticed both of them taking great pride in organizing their stuff into the proper cahier, sheets of paper in crisp plastic covers, neatly organized in their binder. Teachers insist that students use pen (yes, Yanni too) and that everything is written in cursive, titles are underlined with a ruler, etc. Tomee had to borrow some notes from a boy in class to study for a history test and we were both blown away by the neatness of his writing done in fountain pen. And he's not an anomaly. She said that all the kids in her class have beautiful writing. Makes me wonder...what importance do we place on handwriting back home? Is it important? It certainly is impressive. How does it impact their learning?

Tomee's school. She goes to a college (grades 6-9 in Canada). It's the only one in town with approximately 700 students, many of whom take the bus in from the surrounding villages. It's more like a high school than what we consider a middle school. Classes start at 7:55 and end at 4:30 with a lunch break in the afternoon (12-1:30). Wednesdays are half-days. They are on rotary, there are no lockers...so she has to carry all of her stuff with her, and it's quite a large school, so just figuring out where to go was stressful during the first week or two. Most of the subjects rely heavily on textbook readings, doing exercises, and having tests, except for Euro English, which is Tomee's favourite class. She also gets to take Spanish and now walks around the house reciting whatever new phrases she's learned...Me llama Tomee...soy una chica. I love it...following in her mama's footsteps!

There is an Athletic Centre across the road that they use for Phys Ed. (Tomee hates gym) She has it twice a week--a two-hour class, during which they have been doing rock-climbing, and an hour class during which they run for the whole hour to build endurance! Yesterday though instead of doing gym, they had a two hour session on road safety and how to operate small motorbikes. She got to practice driving a vespa through a course!

Yanni's school. His is the largest elementary school (Kind. to gr. 5) in town with approximately 600 kids. The only other school in town is a smaller private Catholic school. Yanni's day starts at 8:20 and ends at 4:30 with a lunch break from 11:30-1:20 and two recesses. He has the same teacher all day on Mon, Thurs, Fri, a different teacher (the meaner one) on Tuesdays, and no school on Wednesdays. On Wednesday afternoons he takes tennis at the tennis club. The hardest thing for Yanni to get used to was that the days felt really long because they spend the entire time in class seated at their desks. There's no lessons on the carpet or group work. It's all teacher-led, with the students at their desks. He came home complaining that his legs hurt the first few days because he couldn't stretch them out during class. They also rely mostly on teaching from textbooks or handouts with questions to answer. Exercises on photocopied sheets have to be cut out and glued into the appropriate cahier and answered in the cahier. He has a dictee to learn each week along with a list of spelling words. This week he also had to memorize the poem, l'Albatros, by Beaudelaire, so there is a fair amount of homework but it is manageable.

Unlike Tomee, gym is Yanni's favourite class and it is the highlight of his week. He even wrote out the instructions for Dodgeball and gave it to the teacher so that the class could play it during one of their gym times. Of course, he's also happy that soccer is the chosen game of recess. The only problem though, he says, is that "they all think they're Rinaldo and spend more time fighting over the ball, and being hotshots than actually playing." The other big schoolyard pastime is trading cards. All of the kids walk around with these blue and

white binders full of cards that you can only get at Carrefour. They're cards of the different DreamWorks movie characters. He was out of the loop until last Saturday evening, when a new friend gave him her doubles (merci Garance) and got him started! Another friend at school gave him an extra used binder he had, plus some more cards and Yanni is now in trading business!

Overall, I'm quite impressed by how quickly both of them have adapted, academically and socially. I'm also impressed with the quality of education they have both had back home. Their level of French (thanks RH and Cosburn) has allowed them to almost effortlessly fit right in to learning here.