So I've started following a 12-week half marathon training plan for beginners. I have more than 12 weeks before my half and I'm not sure if I'm a beginner, but trying to set myself up for success. I've been running for awhile, but very off and on and I haven't done a half marathon in about 5 years. Back when I did do them, I usually averaged 2:40 or more for the 13.1 mile race, so I'm confident that I'll be much faster this year, since for the first time I can break 10-minute miles now.
I'm also struggling with stress, loneliness, etc., and I find I really HAVE to run every day from Thurs-Sun to feel ok. The trainng plan brings some welcome structure to the exercise routine.
I don't always manage to do all the runs each week and have to recalibrate, due to working crazy long hours Mon-Wed, and mainly running Thurs-Sun, but that should work. The goal is 5 runs a week, with 1 longer run. I'm in week 2, so it means that my long runs have only been 4 miles so far. I looked at lots of training plans online, some started with 7 mile long runs, which I can't do yet, I finally found one that seems reasonable.
Since I'm looking for ways to feel more connected to the city where I live, I might volunteer to help organise the half marathon training group. They do their long runs on Saturdays, and I can't really, since I work then. So might be a good opportunity to volunteer to host the same run Sun am. I could still meet new people and I'm very attracted to the idea of working in the health/fitness industry, so this might be good experience? I'm mainly just trying to figure out how I fit into life in Paris.
Saturday, October 29, 2011
Thursday, October 27, 2011
Silver Lining?
In another effort to look on the bright side and see the silver lining in the Parisian clouds, (since I, of course, didn't even have time to go to that yoga thing that I posted about last week and that I thought would align my shakras and help me meet tons of fantastic people with common interests), I realised that I only work at my main job a total of 39 days per semester. That's 78 days total for the 2 semesters. 78 out of 365 days means that I only spend approx. 20% of my time teaching. Although this certainly doesn't reflect grading and prepping, this is still a very small pleasant ratio.
I teach 3 long intense days per week at one university and then have a day off when I should do some class prep, and I often do, but I also sleep late, relax and really just need a recovery day in general. My 3 days a week are LONG and I have an hour commute each way as well, adding 2 hours total. They used to be well balanced: 5-6 hours each day over 3 days, but now they're a little different: 7.5 hours 1 day, 4.5 the following day and 5 hours the 3rd day. This leaves me pretty tired by Thursday, the recovery day. Then Fridays and Saturdays I work half days and Sunday is a day off. I'm starting to appreciate this schedule a lot and I couldn't really imagine working 9-5 in an office Mon-Fri. I love my job on Fridays and I plan to ask them for extra hours this week.
So that's work. For life in general, I really have to get serious about half marathon training. The Paris half marathon training group has their first official training run next Sat (Nov. 5th). I'm looking forward to that and plan to train with them as much as I can (although I work most Saturdays when their long runs are).
I also have some fun things to look forward to in the next few days. I don't really do much of anything during my brief work week, but last night I had a drink with a friend which I enjoyed a lot and I'm looking forward to seeing some other friends (who I haven't seen since before summer vacation!) this Sat. and I'm going to the comédie française this Sunday. To see a tragedy (Bérénice), which I should read first. I don't really have time for French classes, so decided just to go to the theater and read the plays in advance.
I teach 3 long intense days per week at one university and then have a day off when I should do some class prep, and I often do, but I also sleep late, relax and really just need a recovery day in general. My 3 days a week are LONG and I have an hour commute each way as well, adding 2 hours total. They used to be well balanced: 5-6 hours each day over 3 days, but now they're a little different: 7.5 hours 1 day, 4.5 the following day and 5 hours the 3rd day. This leaves me pretty tired by Thursday, the recovery day. Then Fridays and Saturdays I work half days and Sunday is a day off. I'm starting to appreciate this schedule a lot and I couldn't really imagine working 9-5 in an office Mon-Fri. I love my job on Fridays and I plan to ask them for extra hours this week.
So that's work. For life in general, I really have to get serious about half marathon training. The Paris half marathon training group has their first official training run next Sat (Nov. 5th). I'm looking forward to that and plan to train with them as much as I can (although I work most Saturdays when their long runs are).
I also have some fun things to look forward to in the next few days. I don't really do much of anything during my brief work week, but last night I had a drink with a friend which I enjoyed a lot and I'm looking forward to seeing some other friends (who I haven't seen since before summer vacation!) this Sat. and I'm going to the comédie française this Sunday. To see a tragedy (Bérénice), which I should read first. I don't really have time for French classes, so decided just to go to the theater and read the plays in advance.
Friday, October 21, 2011
Bloga
Things haven't been going very well lately, so here's an attempt to relativize and boost morale. Call it an early Thanksgiving meditation. Kind of blog yoga. Bloga? If I repeat this enough, I'll believe it, right? It is all true, but it's always hard to focus on the positives in the midst of all the negatives...
I'm grateful for my job on Fridays, my favorite of my various teaching gigs, and that I have Thursdays off. I'm grateful for how good I feel after running 5K and how good it feels to stretch after a run. I'm grateful for my friends. I'm grateful for my discount gym membership and for the blogs and news websites I like to read each day and for nice hot showers. I'm grateful that I'm branching out and meeting a new group of people tomorrow (a half-marathon training group) and doing yoga (the real thing, not writing trite meditations on a blog) with them.
I'm grateful for my job on Fridays, my favorite of my various teaching gigs, and that I have Thursdays off. I'm grateful for how good I feel after running 5K and how good it feels to stretch after a run. I'm grateful for my friends. I'm grateful for my discount gym membership and for the blogs and news websites I like to read each day and for nice hot showers. I'm grateful that I'm branching out and meeting a new group of people tomorrow (a half-marathon training group) and doing yoga (the real thing, not writing trite meditations on a blog) with them.
Saturday, October 15, 2011
Giganomics, Or Being an Indian Call Center
After hearing about the trend of "giganomics" (I heard about it in the way I hear of many global business trends: from textbooks I use with my students), meaning working freelance gig to gig, rather than having a traditional full-time job, I concur that this is definitely the case for anglophone ESL teachers in France. Non-anglophones, too. It's sometimes project based (exam prep, for example) and usually at universities, a semester or 2 is the longest term available to us or in my last job, I had contracts with my ESL school and a private company for blocks of 10, 20 or 30 hours of business English training. It somehow miraculously worked about to about 20 hours of teaching per week and I somehow miraculously was able to pay my rent each month.
We foreigners here usually don't have the French national teaching qualification and some of us (I'm speaking for myself here) are reluctant to invest in it, so we create our own combinations of part-time jobs which don't require these qualifications. Everyone's looking for the combination that's the best-paying with the best working conditions and the least amount of commuting/prep time/galere.
Piecing together part-time jobs to earn a living is easier to do in France than in the States because we have national health insurance. Health insurance is not dependent upon having a full-time job to get private coverage through an employer like in the States.
Talking about the trend of universities outsourcing positions by recruiting vacataires (temporary replacement teaching staff paid only every 6 months-- sometimes over the following year!) rather than full-time permanent positions, inspired me to announce to my teacher friends over cocktails last weekend, "I am an Indian call center. We all are."
Being an Indian call center can also help justify my twice a week Indian take out habit.
From my Indian call center over veggie samosas, I can tell you that I love some of my teaching jobs, some are just ok and some I do strictly for the paid summer vacation.
Here are the highlights of some of the ones I enjoy the most.
I started a new vacataire position last week where I proofread articles for the ESL newspaper and also do a first draft of them, too. It seems like a very big but very well-organised weekly project and I'm a good proofreader/writer, so feel like it's a good use of my skills (in a way that other teacher duties, such as making 5 million photocopies a week and telling my 50-student classes to stop talking and listen to me, are perhaps not...) After my first shift, they asked me if I'd be interested in doing more hours there per week, so I might be there 2 half-days, instead of just one.
I also tutor private students and they're really interested in English and I scored major points with one of the parents for one of the exercises we did today. I had the kids describe the plots of their favourite mangas to practice using the past tense. Today's French teenagers seem to live their Japanese mangas.
We'll see what kind of user problems the call center faces next week.
We foreigners here usually don't have the French national teaching qualification and some of us (I'm speaking for myself here) are reluctant to invest in it, so we create our own combinations of part-time jobs which don't require these qualifications. Everyone's looking for the combination that's the best-paying with the best working conditions and the least amount of commuting/prep time/galere.
Piecing together part-time jobs to earn a living is easier to do in France than in the States because we have national health insurance. Health insurance is not dependent upon having a full-time job to get private coverage through an employer like in the States.
Talking about the trend of universities outsourcing positions by recruiting vacataires (temporary replacement teaching staff paid only every 6 months-- sometimes over the following year!) rather than full-time permanent positions, inspired me to announce to my teacher friends over cocktails last weekend, "I am an Indian call center. We all are."
Being an Indian call center can also help justify my twice a week Indian take out habit.
From my Indian call center over veggie samosas, I can tell you that I love some of my teaching jobs, some are just ok and some I do strictly for the paid summer vacation.
Here are the highlights of some of the ones I enjoy the most.
I started a new vacataire position last week where I proofread articles for the ESL newspaper and also do a first draft of them, too. It seems like a very big but very well-organised weekly project and I'm a good proofreader/writer, so feel like it's a good use of my skills (in a way that other teacher duties, such as making 5 million photocopies a week and telling my 50-student classes to stop talking and listen to me, are perhaps not...) After my first shift, they asked me if I'd be interested in doing more hours there per week, so I might be there 2 half-days, instead of just one.
I also tutor private students and they're really interested in English and I scored major points with one of the parents for one of the exercises we did today. I had the kids describe the plots of their favourite mangas to practice using the past tense. Today's French teenagers seem to live their Japanese mangas.
We'll see what kind of user problems the call center faces next week.
Saturday, October 08, 2011
Une Autre Philosophie
The understatement of the year was when I was pouring my little heart out about life's professional frustrations (like not having any of the resources I need to teach despite being a teacher) to my Spanish teacher/friend and he commiserated and replied, "c'est une autre philosophie."
That's for sure. I don't even have the energy to discuss how French and American higher education systems are polar opposites. In the US, students have more resources than they need, like gluten-free stir fry night at the cafeteria, study abroad opportunities in places like Uganda (really?) or on planet neptune and like 5 macbook pro Ipads per student and they pay outrageously inflated tuition.
The biggest culture shock I ever had in France was when I started teaching in public universities outside of Paris, which I've done off and on for about 3-4 years, due to the lack of resources.
In France, students and teachers have virtually no resources whatsoever in public universities, and tuition is practically free. I appreciate how democratic this system is-- no application process, anyone who passes their bac gets a place in their local university. Yay, for easy access to higher education. But as a teacher, it's the most frustrating thing on earth to have zero resources. In a real school. In a developed country. Not on the JYA program in Uganda or on Neptune where having no resources would be part of some Authentic Cultural Experience. (I'm a little wary of sending university students to developing countries for study abroad-- seems a little voyeuristic/tourism of poverty to me...)
But anyway, the system needs more money, either from the state or in slightly increased tuition fees. For example, the tacit understanding in my department was that teachers should pay for their own photocopies, which is absurd. We're supposed to post documents online for the kiddies but the department doesn't have a scanner we can use to scan hard copy documents. In most of my classes on the first day (and even 2nd and 3rd days), we didn't have enough chairs for all the kiddies. My class sizes average from 30-45. Even for listening and speaking classes. I buy my own markers for the whiteboard. If I want to do listening comprehension exercises with my kids, I have to bring my own computer and speakers. To avoid using paper, I wanted to use powerpoint, but none of the projector/computer connections work in the rooms where I teach. A teacher friend of mine bought her OWN projector so that she could use powerpoint in class.
Great Books?
Instead of a great books curriculum, it's more like a great copy card curriculum. Students learn from photocopies (teachers cannot require them to buy textbooks because it would discriminate against lower income students who couldn't afford it. Really). Call me insensitive to socio-economic factors, but I don't understand how someone can be university educated without reading books.
While it's great to have affordable tuition fees for French public univesities, I think there should be some kind of selection process in advance. Like minimum language requirements to do a language program, for example. I have kids who can't even form proper verb tenses on the first day. Like "he going." Or "he's go."
Under the current system, the first year can be a big waste of time for freshmen and their teachers. It's a big weed out year, the teachers' mentality is that 65% of the kids enrolled "don't really belong here" and that teachers are doing their jobs by failing over half of the entering class. (There are also probably underlying economic reasons for this, too. It would be way to expensive for the state-- which already seems to have little money for education-- if everyone who started university actually finished).
Like in the US, there's a huge divide between the public and private. I tutor some kids who attend a private middle school where they study Greek and Latin and have 35 hours of classes a week (with maybe only 1-2 hour of homework total per week). The university degrees that are the most respected here are, of course, not from public universities, but private elite schools called Grandes ecoles which impress the hell out of the French.
I don't think I'll ever understand cette autre philosophie, the origin and evolution of public education in France. An emphasis on both democratic equality and individual academic merit doesn't necessarily seem as compatible as the French system would perhaps like. It's a challenging system for the kids. Like I once taught a phonetics class (I did not choose the curriculum) that seemed specifically designed to fail first years by giving them ridiculous words to transcribe like "unmarrigeable." Really? What purpose does that really serve?
To me, it's a very underfunded system, although I recently read an article which said that French education spending was considered high for Europe.
I find it a strange place to work but I'm trying to cheer myself up with the fact that there's something to be said for being a 'global citizen,' whatever that really means and learning about different educational systems besides the British and American ones. And that in a year I can go back to Anglophone universities if I so desire...
That's for sure. I don't even have the energy to discuss how French and American higher education systems are polar opposites. In the US, students have more resources than they need, like gluten-free stir fry night at the cafeteria, study abroad opportunities in places like Uganda (really?) or on planet neptune and like 5 macbook pro Ipads per student and they pay outrageously inflated tuition.
The biggest culture shock I ever had in France was when I started teaching in public universities outside of Paris, which I've done off and on for about 3-4 years, due to the lack of resources.
In France, students and teachers have virtually no resources whatsoever in public universities, and tuition is practically free. I appreciate how democratic this system is-- no application process, anyone who passes their bac gets a place in their local university. Yay, for easy access to higher education. But as a teacher, it's the most frustrating thing on earth to have zero resources. In a real school. In a developed country. Not on the JYA program in Uganda or on Neptune where having no resources would be part of some Authentic Cultural Experience. (I'm a little wary of sending university students to developing countries for study abroad-- seems a little voyeuristic/tourism of poverty to me...)
But anyway, the system needs more money, either from the state or in slightly increased tuition fees. For example, the tacit understanding in my department was that teachers should pay for their own photocopies, which is absurd. We're supposed to post documents online for the kiddies but the department doesn't have a scanner we can use to scan hard copy documents. In most of my classes on the first day (and even 2nd and 3rd days), we didn't have enough chairs for all the kiddies. My class sizes average from 30-45. Even for listening and speaking classes. I buy my own markers for the whiteboard. If I want to do listening comprehension exercises with my kids, I have to bring my own computer and speakers. To avoid using paper, I wanted to use powerpoint, but none of the projector/computer connections work in the rooms where I teach. A teacher friend of mine bought her OWN projector so that she could use powerpoint in class.
Great Books?
Instead of a great books curriculum, it's more like a great copy card curriculum. Students learn from photocopies (teachers cannot require them to buy textbooks because it would discriminate against lower income students who couldn't afford it. Really). Call me insensitive to socio-economic factors, but I don't understand how someone can be university educated without reading books.
While it's great to have affordable tuition fees for French public univesities, I think there should be some kind of selection process in advance. Like minimum language requirements to do a language program, for example. I have kids who can't even form proper verb tenses on the first day. Like "he going." Or "he's go."
Under the current system, the first year can be a big waste of time for freshmen and their teachers. It's a big weed out year, the teachers' mentality is that 65% of the kids enrolled "don't really belong here" and that teachers are doing their jobs by failing over half of the entering class. (There are also probably underlying economic reasons for this, too. It would be way to expensive for the state-- which already seems to have little money for education-- if everyone who started university actually finished).
Like in the US, there's a huge divide between the public and private. I tutor some kids who attend a private middle school where they study Greek and Latin and have 35 hours of classes a week (with maybe only 1-2 hour of homework total per week). The university degrees that are the most respected here are, of course, not from public universities, but private elite schools called Grandes ecoles which impress the hell out of the French.
I don't think I'll ever understand cette autre philosophie, the origin and evolution of public education in France. An emphasis on both democratic equality and individual academic merit doesn't necessarily seem as compatible as the French system would perhaps like. It's a challenging system for the kids. Like I once taught a phonetics class (I did not choose the curriculum) that seemed specifically designed to fail first years by giving them ridiculous words to transcribe like "unmarrigeable." Really? What purpose does that really serve?
To me, it's a very underfunded system, although I recently read an article which said that French education spending was considered high for Europe.
I find it a strange place to work but I'm trying to cheer myself up with the fact that there's something to be said for being a 'global citizen,' whatever that really means and learning about different educational systems besides the British and American ones. And that in a year I can go back to Anglophone universities if I so desire...
Sunday, October 02, 2011
Body Balance and Marivaux
I have a lot of work to do (class prep, nerve calming, and zen-like mental preparation for an insane day at the old workhouse, since every day there is long and insane) but taking a quick blog break.
I went to the gym this morning (for the open house day) for free and did my beloved Body Balance class, it was really nice to go back. I decided to rejoin but just for 3 months, instead of the year. Hated the idea of committing to a year, since I'm thinking about moving. Either to another apartment in the area or to an entirely different country... The ville lumiere has been difficult lately for both professional and personal reasons, especially after being surrounded by my adoring family for a month in the US in August.
The challeges at the moment are trying to piece together the info I need in a new job (believe me, it's always bit of a treasure hunt-- ask x who will tell you to ask Y or maybe you'll just get 4 different answers), trying to figure out my students' real level, how to manage 40-person classes, what 2nd year masters students actually learn in university classes and how to get by with minimal resources. Minimal as in none.
It all feels very energy-depleting and futile, to be honest.
To cheer up, I had a long talk with the family about future options, waking them up early in the American morning. I also decided to go running every day this week at the lovely nearby gym, made plans to meet a few friends on Wedensday (the end of my work week. At least it's short, even if it's painful) and buy a ticket to Le jeu de l'amour et du hasard at the comedie francaise. The theater used to cheer me up a lot. It's kind of a sustitute for social interaction, but with wittier dialogue and everyone is better dressed.
I went to the gym this morning (for the open house day) for free and did my beloved Body Balance class, it was really nice to go back. I decided to rejoin but just for 3 months, instead of the year. Hated the idea of committing to a year, since I'm thinking about moving. Either to another apartment in the area or to an entirely different country... The ville lumiere has been difficult lately for both professional and personal reasons, especially after being surrounded by my adoring family for a month in the US in August.
The challeges at the moment are trying to piece together the info I need in a new job (believe me, it's always bit of a treasure hunt-- ask x who will tell you to ask Y or maybe you'll just get 4 different answers), trying to figure out my students' real level, how to manage 40-person classes, what 2nd year masters students actually learn in university classes and how to get by with minimal resources. Minimal as in none.
It all feels very energy-depleting and futile, to be honest.
To cheer up, I had a long talk with the family about future options, waking them up early in the American morning. I also decided to go running every day this week at the lovely nearby gym, made plans to meet a few friends on Wedensday (the end of my work week. At least it's short, even if it's painful) and buy a ticket to Le jeu de l'amour et du hasard at the comedie francaise. The theater used to cheer me up a lot. It's kind of a sustitute for social interaction, but with wittier dialogue and everyone is better dressed.
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