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Day in the Life of a teacher

French lessons don’t start until 3pm in the winter season to leave plenty of time for our students to ski, so during the morning, Lucille will either be teaching other lessons, or if she has a free morning going skiing and enjoying the beautiful mountains. It’s important that our teachers and staff know the area as well, as often students enjoy hearing our recommendations for places to ski, restaurants, bars and so on.

Lucille has a quick lunch before the lessons begin and makes sure everything is ready. This week Lucille is teaching an advanced French group.

At 3pm, lessons start. Today Lucille is teaching her class how to express their opinions, using the theme of a popular French singer called Stromae.

The lesson begins with some typical French expressions. Expressions are written on a piece of paper, each student picks one then has to guess the meaning of it. Most students get it wrong, but they have fun discovering the real meaning.

Next the students look at photos taken from the video clip of a song by Stromae. They have to describe them and give their personal interpretation of them.

Then they watch the first part of the video clip but without the sound and discuss it. Lucille then gives them some different images from the video clip to elicit further interpretations. Finally they watch the whole video clip with the sound and discuss how close their interpretations were to being true and what they thought of the video.

At 4.30pm there is a 15 minute break so the students can have a quick tea or coffee. The intensive course is hard work, so it’s good to have a break so you can rest your brain. After the break, to cement understanding of the video, the students watch it again, this time with the written lyrics.

Next the students are presented with information about Stromae himself: his life, his success, his clothing brand and a few anecdotes about his life.

The students then have a conversation based on the following questions:

What do you think of Stromae? What do you think about the topics he writes about in his music? Do you think we can write pop songs about anything?

Finally Lucille gives them their homework, which is to write their opinion about the song/video clip/artist.

The students have learnt a lot about the French language, but also about French culture and music too.

At 6.15pm lessons finish and Lucille will spend time preparing the lessons for the next day.

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