Eric Anderson’s Journal
November 2001
Vire, Calvados, Basse Normandie
Dear readers and future assistants,
This month was just so much more enjoyable and relaxing than October. Once I made it through October, everything settled down and became less confusing. This month I was able to just focus on teaching and enjoy living in France. There was no more paper work to have to worry about. It was quite a relief. At the end of October and the beginning of November was the first vacation, called les vacances de Toussaints. It was a week long and a nice break. My parents have some friends that live in Lyon, so I contacted them to see if I could visit them during the vacation. Well, as it turns out, they were going to be on vacation at a resort in the mountains of the Alsace region in eastern France. They invited me to come stay with them for four days. So I took a nine-hour train trip there. It was quite a beautiful train trip through the French countryside. The resort in the mountains was absolutely beautiful and it was nice to be with Americans again.
On November 5 was my birthday, and in one of my classes at a primary school, the students had brought three cakes and some soda from home that their parents had made and they all sang happy birthday to me in English. I was so surprised ! I had only told them once when I had first met them weeks earlier when my birthday was, and they had all remembered. So that made me feel so great. For the rest of that first week after the vacation I had teacher training courses every day. One was in Caen, and the other two were in a town named Falaise. I met some really nice people there, including an American lady who’s living in France for two years with her two kids and her French husband. Béatrice Bachelot helped us all to plan more lessons, and we all worked in pairs for two days making lessons plans, and then we photocopied all of our lesson plans and gave them to each other. Now I have enough lesson plans to last me for many, many months. It’s such a relief and it was so very nice being able to work with other people.
I was homesick during the week of Thanksgiving. However, there is absolutely no hint of Thanksgiving in France, so that made it a little easier to bear. The American lady whom I had met earlier in the month at the stage invited me to her house for the weekend of Thanksgiving, so that was great. They lived in the middle of the countryside and I spent time playing games with the children and then we took a walk through the forest and came across a château. Then on Sunday morning we went to Caen to go shopping at the open-air market. It was huge and just an amazing experience. I highly recommend visiting open-air markets in France. After than I went with the family to the grandparents house to a big, French-style meal that lasted all afternoon. It was delicious ! As I was leaving, the American mom invited me to come back the following weekend to celebrate her daughter and her mother-in-law’s birthday. So I went to their house that weekend on Friday and helped the mom make a Thanksgiving-style meal. There were going to be about 12 people there, so we had a great time making the food. We even made homemade pumpkin pie. I brought some microwave popcorn that my family had sent me for my birthday and made it once the French guests had arrived. They thought it was so neat and they all gathered around the microwave to watch it pop. They thought it was some kind of delicacy. So that was rather humorous. The next day I went to son’s soccer game, which was fun to watch.
The teaching this month has gone quite smoothly again. I had fun teaching the students about Thanksgiving. You can find an ubelievable amount of teaching ideas and activities for Thanksgiving on the Internet. Just go to www.google.com and type in Thanksgiving activities and you’ll receive many, many links to some great webpages. During the week of Thanksgiving, I gave a piece of candy to each student at the college who answered a question correctly. That worked extremely well ! I had mass participation like never before. Well, that’s about it for the month of November. Feel free to contact me with any questions you may have now or in the future. My e-mail address is : ericga@uwm.edu
-Eric Anderson