On Tuesday and Wednesday last week it rained heavily in Valence. Although this gave the teachers an ideal opportunity to introduce the students to the phrase ‘it’s raining cats and dogs’, it became more serious when images of flooding appeared on social media. The Ardèche region, just across the river, experiences flash flooding from time to time, but rarely on this scale. Some places recorded 500mm of rain in 24 hours. My friend in Annonay told me that the town centre there was completely flooded, and that school had been shut for the final few days of term. Valence was fine, although on Wednesday as I walked along the Rhône in the sun, the brown water lapped at the edges of the riverside path and pieces of debris floated by.
Thursday and Friday were the hardest days of teaching I have had so far. I started teaching on my own for the first time, no teacher in the room to assist. I had planned a lesson about how to form a question in English, starting with a video interview with Lance Armstrong, in which Oprah Winfrey uses a range of question forms for dramatic effect. However, the classrooms in my school are slightly archaic and the technology didn’t always work as I had hoped (one time I just gave up and played the video on my phone). I explained the basic structure of questions in English and then got them to play a guessing game, similar to the post-it note ‘who am I?’ party game. At first the older groups had been quite quiet and difficult to engage with, but I found the game got them to increase in confidence so that my final game/exercise went fairly well. When I repeated the same lesson plan with a younger group it was slightly trickier because I had to focus more on discipline. It was hard to keep everyone in the room entertained without leaving some of the lower-ability students behind.
I was incredibly relieved to finish on Friday, although I was satisfied that I had started well. We don’t receive a lot of training or advice, and I’d basically been given carte blanche on lesson content. Mostly my aim is to make the students more confident at speaking in English, whatever their level.
On Friday evening I caught the bus to my friend in the flood-stricken Annonay, travelling through the Ardechois countryside which was starting to turn a golden brown colour. Sharp hillsides dotted with vineyards rose up around, and the coach snaked its way through a valley into Annonay which sat in a dell, houses rising up its steep sides. We had planned on attending a DJ event, however it was cancelled because the venue had been flooded. So instead we watched a film for the evening. In the morning we picked up some other assistants and headed to Grenoble in the car, stopping first at a small Chateau in a town called Vizille.
The chateau was very picturesque, and its front gates were situated in the centre of the town, which I thought was unusual. However, its grounds extended back into the surrounding hills. Part of the chateau is now a museum detailing the historical events of the French Revolution. It contains portraits, pottery and scale model representations that were pieced together to form a complete story of the events. However, the museum was very dark and echoey, and I was struggling to remember some of the basic facts about the French Revolution which were taken for granted in the captions beside certain works.
Having done more research since, I have discovered that Grenoble played an important role in the French Revolution largely thanks to the ‘Day of the Tiles’, during which townspeople threw rooftiles onto Louis XVI’s soldiers. This was one of the first notable riots of the Revolution, and is credited by some as its beginning. In this period, Grenoble was still considered a part of the Dauphiné region, so called after Guigues IV, the heir apparent to the French throne. He bore a dolphin on his coat of arms, and the word for dolphin is ‘dauphin’ in French, hence the word for Prince going forwards and the name of the region.
In the afternoon we drove into Grenoble to find our Airbnb, then walked through the streets at sunset towards the téléphérique which snakes up a very steep hillside towards the bastille building on the summit. From the cable car we saw Grenoble spread out below, its light forming a glowing web of traffic and shops. The Alps were silhouetted against the sky as it grew dark, although it still glowed deep blue and starless. At points among the blackness of the mountains groups of flickering lights were visible where ski resorts lay dormant before the season’s beginning in a few months. We spent some time at the top wandering around before descending once more and finding dinner at a noodle place.
The next day was clear and sunny, but felt very autumnal. We found a café where Frenchmen sipped coffee over the newspaper and the staff meandered around the tables, in no hurry to do business. I have definitely sensed a lack of rush and chaos in France, even in the cities, that is very opposed to the bustle of London.
We had planned on visiting an archaeological museum, and so drove to a road nearby and parked the car. On getting out we were unsure whether the parking was free, but a man who walked by informed us that it was, as it was a Sunday. Thanking him, we moved on but were waylaid by a flea market that occupied a long cobbled street between some pale pink buildings. Most of the stalls were selling clothes and I became so preoccupied by a checked skirt for four euros that I became detached from the others. Around half an hour later my friend called me to say that the car had been broken into and some of the bags were gone. I rushed back to the car, where my friends were waiting. Someone had smashed the small window by the wing mirror and reached in to open the car with the inner door handle. They had pulled the back seats down to access the boot and pull out some of the bags. However, it transpired that they hadn’t taken my bag, which ironically was the only one containing an electrical device. One of the bags stolen contained my friend’s passport and she was understandably very upset. Luckily we still had our phones and money, and we then drove to the police station. The officer on the desk informed us that there was very little they could do (there are few staff on Sundays), and that we were better returning to Annonay and making the complaint from there. In the meantime we could use cardboard to block up the window. I decided to get the train back to Valence to simplify things, and we parted in fairly low spirits.
(Since then, my friend accessed the footage on her dashboard camera and discovered that the person responsible for the break in was also the man who informed us that parking was free of charge)
I am spending the two weeks holiday in England, however blogs will resume in a week or so when I return to start the second term.