French 2 Teaching highlights

These are the juniors from my French 2 class. Unfortunately I'm missing the seniors because they don't have to come to class the last week of school.

My French 2 class has certainly had its moments, but for the most part been a joy. They are a rouge bunch of juniors and seniors that have a vivid desire to play pranks on me. But I was able to get them back a few times. After polling them about some of their favorite class moments, and adding a few of my own, this is what we came up with.

• Sticking it to the man. Often, being a part of a Christian school, there are many restrictions and controversial topics. One of which was the movie "The Golden Compass," an anti-church novel made movie that was pushed for Children entertainment. Of course the administration had a field day with that one, forbidding faculty and students alike to support this film with our time or money. I was curious what my older students were feeling about this censorship and closed mindedness, so I encouraged in-class discussions, where we pondered these ideas and more. The results were impressive. It really brought out a serious maturity in my students that I hadn't seen before. Some held their ground about not supporting something that they felt was anti-Christian, while others saw it in the theaters to merely broaden their perspectives.


• Our many food days, which we all loved, that included all sorts of French food. Quiche, brioche, pain au chocolat, brie et baguettes, croque monsieurs, et cetera...


• This class loved hearing funny Matt stories, so often we would plot together how we could play some ultimate pranks on my husband. They loved hearing about his irrational fear of midgets, and so the majority of the pranks revolved around obtaining a little person and somehow hiding it in our house.


• Probably my personal favorite French 2 moment was completely fooling my entire class with a little prank website called "Peter Answers." http://www.peteranswers.com/ Seeing that I have access to alot of personal information of my students, i.e. addresses, birthdays, parents and siblings names, not to mention all of the wild conversations I overhear in class, I had these kids really freaked out. The idea behind Peter Answers is that you can ask it any question and the typer disguises the answer inside the question undetected. When this website could tell them what color shirt they were wearing, their parents names and their birthday, they were....needless to say....freaked out.

I have to admit that their highlight of the year was a doozy! They collaborated to prank me good on April Fool's day, and they had great success.

• As many of you know, among many things, I am terrified of masks. Stupidly, I confessed this to my students one day early this year. On April 1, Zach asked to go to the restroom (particularly common for him), and I obliged. And as I innocently walked around the room to check homework, they waited for me to inch closer to the door. Meanwhile, Zach had obtained the mascot head (a creepy looking Wolverine with barred teeth) from administration, who were also somewhat in on this. When I was about 8 feet from the door, the wolverine burst in and grabbed me. I let out a few blood-curdling screams at the top of my lungs, which caused nearly every teacher in this zip code to come running, thinking someone had just been brutally murdered. My students had been prepared, and filmed the entire thing and planned to put it on YouTube. But I was totally the man, and confiscated the camera and deleted the footage. I wasn't about to have that viewed by the world, even though it was pretty funny.