Saturday, September 15, 2007

To serve the Republic

Yesterday I finally got to visit the school and meet some of the staff. It really looks like a desirable area; no buildings over three storeys, no concrete blocks, clean streets and so on. The school itself has no graffiti and there's a wide age range of staff (too many young teachers is usually a bad sign as it means no one stays any longer than they have to).

The deputy head seemed a bit suspicious of me, but the head welcomed me with open arms and said, without irony, how glad lucky they were to now have un citoyen de Sa Gracieuse Majesté working in their school! Good thing I didn't mention how I feel about the monarchy... The English-teaching staff are very excited to have a native speaker on the team, although they speak to me in French most of the time. Most of my classes are 11-12 year old beginners so I shouldn't need to put the fear of God into them to get some work out of them since they've only been there a week longer than me.

The only cloud on the horizon is that someone from the academie rang to say there was a problem with la D.O.S. (I don't know what it stands for either -I'm still brewing a blog post about initials in this country), which means I can't be officially installé yet, which might mean a delay in getting paid. Probably means there's yet another paper in the President of the Republic's in-tray waiting for his signature. Well, I suppose he is my boss now...


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2 comments:

M C Ward said...

It doesn't mean Director of Studies, does it?

M. le Prof d'Anglais said...

Nope, it's some French administrative thing I don't know about, probably Something Something Service. Here, even the people using the initials often don't know what they stand for.