les agneaux égarés

Sorry for the lateness of this email, family, etc. I woke up late because I'm a bit sick and then went out and about, so that took a good chunk of my day, and then I made an early dinner for myself and the girls and worked through some interpersonal drama, but here is the email now.

I am typing on my new laptop! Which still smells like new laptop, and the battery works, and it's not hot enough to cook an egg on, and all of this is rampantly exciting. Also exciting: having gotten back from England! Though really it was more fun to be in England. It's a bit tough getting used to the touchpad on this laptop actually working: I keep closing windows and selecting things by accident.

We spent most of our time in Cambridge. The kids were in host families and so were we, thus neatly circumventing the problems of a bunch of teenagers staying a hotel. Divide and conquer, that's the strategy. And it seemed like the students behaved very well, and most of the host families were really good, except the ones who didn't come to pick up their students on time, or the family that let their kids walk home alone on the second day in the dark, leading to the kids getting lost for two hours and us almost going to the police before we found them. That was stressful, let me say. I was sick that day, just aching and sitting on the couch in a haze while Virginie and Marie-Claude tried and tried to make calls, and then I had to get in the faces of the cranky English people who kept making things worse by shouting and talking about how problems with the students were causing them personal problems in their relationships. Seriously, things we don't need to know about. They kept suggesting that the two boys had gone off to a party or a pub or were out painting the town, and we kept explaining that no, these boys wouldn't do that, they're tall but they're just scared kids right now, in a country where they don't really speak the language, in a neighborhood they don't know at all, and they're cold and hungry.

Fortunately, we found them eventually and that was good. The next morning, two of the girls got lost on the way to the bus stop, but that didn't take nearly two hours to resolve, and there weren't really any problems after that. It's tough to travel with forty-five eleventh and twelfth graders and only four teachers/responsible people (for the record: me, Virginie, who is my responsable and arranges things for me, Marie-Claude, who teaches English in the professional high school, and Gautier, the adorable surveillant who tends a bit to discipline). They do have a tendancy to want to wander off, and then you really feel bad for them when they wander off by accident and end up frightened and confused. None of them seemed to have realized they needed adapters to be able to charge their phones, so we couldn't even call them.

So the first day was the Duxford War Museum, which is lots and lots of little old airplanes, some of which fly through the air in horrifying loops. It was a nice museum, but really too many planes for the students, who had been on a bus approximately forever. I had a group of ten kids, about half of whom I knew and half of whom I didn't, and I sheparded them all around and felt like an actual factual grownup for the first time in a school setting. We watched the engineers restoring the old planes and we looked at the tank museum. Adrian set off an alarm (not that I knew his name at the time; he was just number Seven). We rode the tiny tram for a long time just for kicks and then went to the café, where four of the boys tried to escape from my silken clutches, but I showed them my iron fist and they settled down. Then it was on to Cambridge to meet the families.

Wednesday (the night that Maxime and Florent got lost) we spent in Norwich, looking at the castle and the cathedral and exploring the village. There's a nice museum made out of part of the old castle. I had to keep dragging Nicolas and Laurent back to my group when they would wander off to the main room to eat their sandwiches, but for the most part, everyone behaved really well (except for the bit where they started knocking over each other's block castles, but the fact that they were playing with blocks in the first place was ridiculously endearing). Then we had free time, which meant I went off with the teachers to have actual lunch instead of the pathetic bag lunches our families had made (seriously, they were not tasty, though it was kind of the family to make them) and the kids went off to stuff themselves with sugar and try to find posh clothes on sale. There are all these twisty little medieval lanes around the cathedral in Norwich (Norrich, as Virginie and Marie-Claude took great pride in pronouncing after our host family had corrected us).

Thursday we had a nice guided tour of bits of Cambridge (in French). We saw King's Chapel, King's College, and then Clare College, Trinity College, and St. John's in passing. Sadly, our guide wasn't very interesting, and the kids just aren't always fascinated by Stephen Hawking and J.M. Keynes (I was, but with the French school system, only a small group of them are studying sciences, and only a small group are studying economics, so there was always a large percentage of clueless students). The architecture was lovely, though, and it was nice to see so many students on bicycles. By this point, seven kids of my group had decided we were best friends, which was sweet. The boys would come to me to translate song lyrics and things they'd heard other drivers shouting (being a French bus, the door opened on the wrong side, and so we'd get people angry at us for standing on the shoulder of the road in the path of traffic waiting for the students to debark). In the afternoon we went to see Gainsborough's house and a funny little village called Lavenham where all the houses are crooked wattle and daub painted in picturesque colors.

Friday we left! To a chorus of blame from some cranky host parents, whom I sorted out. It was funny: they were praising the kids at the same time they were yelling at us for being late (we weren't, except that the parents were). Two of the biggest, sassiest boys from the professional side of the high school got kissed on the cheek by their host mom and praised up and down (and they are sweet when they want to be: one of them carried my bags in London just to be nice). We hit the Museum of London on the way and walked up and down Piccadilly Circus. I spent too much money buying delicious vegetarian food and a big block of cheddar cheese, but it was worth it. Virginie had predicted that the kids would all sleep on the bus on the way home, but instead they were awake and singing. A couple of my kids started serenading me, which was sweet. The ones in the back of the bus kept standing up and shuffling around too, which was strictly not allowed. I shouted at one of the worst ones at one point and got an ovation for it. It's like they forget I can speak French, even though I speak French with them all the time when we're not in class. I don't whip out the discipline so often, really, so it's weird to them when I do. A couple of them have started saluting me when I make them behave. I am entertained.

And you know what? It was sunny most of the time we were in England. How weird is that? Plus, once I got there, all I wanted to do was speak French to everyone, even though all the people around me were speaking English.

Today I went to the Cambrai Museum with Anna and her friend Laura, and it was surprisingly large, modern, and well-stocked. There was, of course, a lot of stuff from the old cathedral that got destroyed in the Revolution (too bad: it was apparently the jewel of the Pays Bas and the finest cathedral in all Christendom) and a plan relief of how the city used to look in the 18th century, and a lot of history about how important Cambrai has been (really important! Surprisingly enough!) and then art, art, art from everywhere, and a bunch of bones from the tombs they've discovered by Cambrai. There's a nice bust of Hugo by Rodin, and a piece by Camille Claudel, and a few other vaguely famous things by vaguely famous people. It was very lovely. A nice thing to do on a Sunday. And then when we left, the woman at the desk gave us free stuff. Yes!

So tomorrow it's back to school.

By the by, these are my students singing on the bus.