The joy of teaching in Paris
In my other life as a classroom teacher, things are going well
Hello lovelies,
I dug deep this week to bring you some reflections about the part-time work I do in Paris as an English teacher. There were no plans for it to be an ongoing thing when I started 2022, but I ended up loving it so much that I still do it.
Working with young people here has taught me so much about my new home country. I see a generation with so much to offer the world, and it’s a pleasure to support them in their dreams.
There’s a lot about my values as a teacher, and what I have learned over almost 20 years in the profession.
Enjoy,
Robert
You know the cliché in action movies where the main character gets called back for one last job? They’ve retired from their job as a police officer or a soldier and are enjoying some peace in their life until, one day, their old boss knocks at their door.
The set up hits home for me somewhat because it parallels my relationship with the teaching profession.
I started out my career teaching high school English and History. Like most teachers, I found the work both rewarding and gruelling. The latter aspect — how draining the job can be at times — has prompted me to make several lateral moves during my career, searching for a better work life balance.
There have been moments in my career where I’ve thought about hanging up my teaching shoes entirely. To go full-time as a yoga teacher. Or a writer. Or most recently as a therapist.
But every time I’ve started down that path, there is something always comes up that gets me back into the classroom. Like that boss knocking on the door, asking for me to come back for last job.
Each time, it’s always worked out well for me. Keeping open to new opportunities has kept alive my passion for teaching — often at times when it’s been on brink of disappearing.
1. A new life in Paris
In 2022, I had recently moved to France and was just starting my therapy practice. I’d uprooted myself from over 13 years of living in Singapore and was settling into a new city, learning a completely new language, and adapting myself to a culture that was far more foreign to me than I had expected.
I was in my mid 30s, processing a whole lot of changes that a few years earlier I had no idea were coming to me.
The idea to do a little classroom teaching was suggested to me by my partner at the time. She was the boss knocking at my door, and just like the movie here, I was reluctant to accept. I wanted to focus full time on my therapy business. To distract myself from that to start teaching? To go back to something I had left?
But the idea ticked around in my head.
My schedule had enough available time in it that adding a few days of teaching here and there wasn’t unfeasible.
Eventually, the wisdom of my then-partner’s suggestion hit me.
I was in a time in my life when every day was a battle. My French was at the level of a four year old native speaker, and I was navigating the labyrinthine bureaucracy of France to do all manner of things: registering myself with the health care system here, getting my driver’s license converted, figuring out my living conditions and more.
Even making small talk with people here failed more often than not, yielding me little more than a confused facial expressions.
A part-time return to something more familiar would give me a way to put into practice a skill set that I’ve developed over almost 20 years.
Flexing my muscles in a domain I had a sense of mastery in, struck me as a way to reinforce the self-confidence I could feel slipping away from me.
So, I updated my resume and began searching.
2. Landing on my feet
It wasn’t the first time in my life that I had found myself in a new city, searching for a job as a teacher. At 21 years old, I’d been in the same position as a fresh arrival in Singapore.
This time around, however, I had years of teaching experience on my resume, so I had plenty of offers.
I ended up choosing a position in the English teaching department at ISART Digital.
They’re a private university in Paris specializing in disciplines where art and technology intersect, such as video game design, programming, and music production. Their video game design program is particularly well-regarded, regularly ranked as one of the best in the world.
My interview with ISART had left me very enthusiastic about working there.
The school had a pleasant ambiance. The physical spaces are clean and technologically equipped. The students carried themselves with an air of both industry and ease, as if they felt comfortable being there.
These are very good signs to see in any educational environment.
But what really impressed me was ISART’s pedagogical approach. It’s modern and bold, something that can be a rare thing to find in France, where traditionally proven ideas are often given more value than newer innovations. It was clear that there was audacious thinking going on not just in the English department, but in the entire institution as a whole.
ISART’s openness to innovation was very reassuring to me.
One of my key motivations in founding my own education business in 2016 was that I wanted to be able to practice a modern approach to education than that was closely aligned with my values.
It’s a wonderful thing to experience when your professional life matches harmoniously with your values. In 2022, when I began looking for teaching work in institutions, I hadn’t been sure that I would find one that fit me so well.
In fact, I had assumed I would need to compromise on certain values I hold dear to me — as many teachers do at times in their career.
Something else struck me too: the management of ISART were meticulously organized but still very open to me implementing my own ideas. That’s rare in education, a profession where more of one usually means less of the other.
It’s no easy balancing act for an institution to be flexible enough to able to empower teachers to be creative in their practice while also running things like clockwork.
In all my career as a teacher, I had never been as impressed with an educational institution as I was with ISART.
There was no way I was going to refuse an offer to work with them.
3. “Did I just bite off more than I can chew?”
Accepting the position at ISART left me with something from a conundrum.
Remember that my goal in searching for teaching work had been to find something familiar as way to build my confidence in a transitional moment of my life? Another way to rephrase that could be that I was looking for a cushy gig.
I knew from what I had seen of ISART’s high standards that this was not going to be a cushy gig. I’d received offers from other universities in which it was made very explicit to me that the institution’s expectations of the English programme were not high.
“Do what you like, we don’t really care,” was the ethos.
At ISART, by comparison, it was “do what you like, and we really, really care.”
(If you’re ever faced with a similar choice, always choose the latter: we always grow when we place ourselves with passionate people.)
The prospect of starting teaching at ISART was somewhat nerve-wracking. While I had no doubts about the quality of support I would receive from management, I wanted to honour the seriousness of the standards they set.
There would be much for me to adapt myself to.
For starters, I would integrating technology into my classes on a scale I never had before. Imagine the most advanced secondary school in the world and you’ll get a sense of how the classrooms operate at ISART.
Anything that involves recorded assessment is mediated through technology for record keeping and transparency, and pretty much all of the activities I do in my classes involve using technology to some degree.
On the higher side of this integration, a lesson may, for example, have students producing written text. They’ll be typing their texts into documents on a shared cloud folder that allows me, as the teacher, to view all their work in real time and give recorded feedback on their work. Other students are able to collaborate with them too, something that can be used as a way for them to exchange editorial feedback.
It’s a powerful ability for students and teachers: to collaborate through cloud documents. As a teacher, I’ve found it reasonably straightforward to implement also — which is good, because there are usually other balls to be juggling with technology at the same time in any given class.
Things can get complicated, and as a teacher, you want to be prepared for that — including having off-line alternatives.
I could have gone in with a traditional classroom approach to make things easier for me, but I wanted to meet the students of ISART on their own terms as much as I could. That’s part of a teacher’s job, as I see it.
Those students are there because they dream about working in careers where they will be using technology at the highest levels. Think of the term “digital natives;” the students at ISART are the ones who will be creating the digital environments of the future that we will be the natives in.
Of course, sometimes I do activities where we get away from that technology. I’m the English teacher, and the idea is to build their communication skills, and getting back to the basics of talking to each other, face-to-face, is an essential part of that.
In the context of my teaching at ISART, the decision to not use technology is one of many considerations that goes into the lesson planning.
This was one of the areas I considered during the summer of 2022, prior to starting my classes.
There were key logistical particularities to work around also.
Each of my English classes would take the form of a three-hour workshop, sometimes with groups of more than 30 students at a time.
Three hours does not leave a teacher much room to wing things. If you’re teaching a 30-minute class and your students seem bored after 15 minutes, there are plenty of ways to divert the course of the lesson with something from the top of your head to salvage the remaining 15 minutes. Winging it to land the plane.
Imagine doing that for 2 hours and 45 minutes. I’ve avoided finding myself in the position because of my planning.
And three hours is a lot of time to prepare for in a lesson.
Imagine how exhausting it would be to watch a three-hour movie in which all the scenes play out at maximum energy. Or how boring it would be if it were the same two characters throughout. You can get away with that for 30 minutes, but three hours is an entirely different beast.
You need to plan a range of activities with different rhythms and energy levels to make sure everyone stays engaged.
In all of my classes there are a mix of activities: some involve students getting out of their seats and moving around the room, while others they’re stationary. Some are group, some are individual. Some are active, some are passive. Some have high-stakes (like assessment grades), others have none at all.
As the teacher it’s my job to curate these activities into some kind of coherent flow.
I’m not a fan of rigidly planning this flow, either.
During my years of teaching, I’ve realised that my classes work best when I am able to adapt them to the needs to those students, at that time.
As an example, I can give the same lesson to two classes: the first in the morning, the second in the afternoon.
In the mornings, the students invariably arrive tired: few of them are morning people and many travel long distances to get to ISART. Some days it can take up to 20 minutes until I feel that the students are mentally present enough to take on serious work. Afternoons, by contrast, they students are tired, but in a different way that means if we don’t get into serious work quickly enough, they’re in danger of drifting off.
If my class involves administrative business, I like to get that out of the way early. “Boring stuff first, then fun” is a natural order of things to me. But, the possibility of transport network problems in Paris means that I can never assume punctual attendance of my morning classes, so I need to be flexible in case.
And sometimes, certain classes just warm to particular activities because of the vibe of the day. If students are really benefiting from an activity, I like to be able to prolong it so they can get the most out of it. Or to shorten it if they’re not.
Such are the kinds of considerations that go into my lesson planning. I had a lot to think about that summer, particularly because this would be the first time I would ever be working with French students.
My target audience was a completely unknown variable to me.
I had a lot of conversations in my own head that were intended to build comfort with the idea that anything could happen — including many I could never envisage. That I would do my preparation and when my first day come I would be some mix of needlessly over-prepared, adequately-prepared and entirely unprepared.
3. Embracing uncertainty: a teacher’s ace card
As I wrote earlier, it was “somewhat nerve-wracking.”
“Somewhat” is not me understating things for emphasis here. If I had to give a percentage score to my level of concern, I would say it was about 10%. This means I was aware of the ways things could have turned out — including for the worst — but not particularly worried about failing.
“I would be some mix of needlessly over-prepared, adequately-prepared and entirely unprepared,” describes every single day of a teacher’s life. I was very used to living with such ambiguity, and I trusted the management of ISART.
Most importantly, I trusted myself. By that point of my career, I had the kind of self-assurance of that a veteran teacher cultivates.
(A very nice thing to have, too, I must say, since I spent a good chunk of my career lacking it and consequently feeling plagued by anxiety.)
All went well in my first year at ISART.
My boss had given me lesson plans for my first couple of classes. They worked well and gave me the space to adapt to all the curve balls the classroom technology threw my way.
When it came time to start using my own lesson ideas, I was familiar enough with the students that I could target them well enough. I was teaching the same lessons to five different classes, meaning that I was having five separate opportunities to refine the ideas as I went along.
4. Teachers: you’re not perfect; show it to your students
There were, of course, plenty of hiccups along the way.
Students would ask me questions about the school, and my ignorance revealed how new I was. I had constant issues with technology that delayed my classes. My activity ideas were generally solid, but sometimes they were poorly executed — something the first group to try them definitely noticed.
These are the kind of moments that might cause a teacher to feel embarrassed. I know because once upon a time, in my early years in the profession, I too would have felt embarrassed by them.
Nowadays, I feel comfortable to let my students see them. In fact, it’s important to me that I never mislead my students about my shortcomings.
If a student asks me a question about grammar, for example, and I don’t know the answer, that’s exactly what I tell them. If we have time, I’ll show them how to find the answer. We can ask other students in the class who might know, or we can use Google to figure it out.
“I don’t know, and here’s how to find the answer” is a response that students always seem to appreciate. It’s certainly more helpful than a partial response intended by the teacher to save their own face.
Another thing I routinely stuff is up is my students’ names. Despite my best efforts, there is at least one student in every class who I will consistently call by the wrong name for most of the year (“Sorry, Josh, who is actually Joseph”).
I don’t mind if my students laugh at me for stuff like that because I show them I’m happy to laugh at myself over it. Since I can’t change my brain to perfectly recall everyone’s names, I may as well get comfortable with how it works.
I used to wish it weren’t the case, and spent a lot of time practicing techniques to enhance my recall of names. I have some success with them, but it’s never perfect, and even at my best, I’m average at best.
Some teachers seem to think they need to appear as though they are fountains of knowledge on all things. That if they don’t know something perfectly or that they don’t do something perfectly, that they will lose their authority as a teacher.
It’s a misguided attitude.
If a teacher believes their students won’t respect them because they are imperfect, their students will inevitably believe that their teacher won’t respect them unless they are perfect.
In a learning environment, mistakes are part of the process. As a teacher, you want your students to feel comfortable making mistakes. What better way to teach them this than by being a role model of comfort with your own?
Provided you’re doing an otherwise good job, your students will find it reassuring. They’ll trust you because they know you won’t judge them harshly for their mistakes.
Teachers do their students a great service by normalizing mistakes, and the best way to start is by setting the example with your own.
5. The more fun it is, the easier it is
You’re probably getting a sense of the feeling I want my classes to have.
It’s very important to me that the learning environments I offer feel safe and supportive.
I work hard to create that because it’s only in those conditions that students feel safe enough to have fun.
Having fun is widely understood to be an important part of learning.
And for me, having a fun classroom environment goes further than just grade outcomes.
A fun environment gives me, as the teacher, a chance to get to know my students on a much deeper level. It’s when people are having fun that they can most comfortably express who they are.
6. Being a teacher: my school of life
Fostering such an environment at ISART is essential work. Many students could be considered “artsy types.” They’re emotionally sensitive people and their key motivation for pursuing careers in the creative industry often is a desire to express and share something with the world that is important to them.
In getting to know my students at ISART, I’ve learned so many things about France that would have otherwise remained opaque to me.
What it’s like to go through the education system in France as a student with a learning difficulty. Or what it’s like to move from a remote part of France to Paris, alone at 18 years old, to study at a university. Even from somewhere as far as Tahiti.
As a foreigner, I cherish the chance to learn from the life stories of my students. It gives me new ways to see my own life experiences.
Despite having been a gamer myself during my childhood and adolescence, I’d never considered how my own racial privilege had factored into me being able to enjoy games on a different level. People of non-white racial identities have been very under-served by the video-game industry as a whole.
Understanding that by seeing how it has played out in the lives of my students has given me a newfound appreciation of the importance of diversity in media representation.
ISART has a lot of minority students, and takes very seriously their commitment to creating a safe and inclusive learning environment for all. It makes me happy to see how comfortable students are able to be with their own difference at ISART. They work hard to foster a nurturing environment for the students.
And I benefit from being able to experience that diversity also. I’m lived in social contexts that have meant I had had no meaningful experiences with transgendered people, until I began working at ISART.
Remember how earlier I wrote how frequently I have problems with recalling names? The same thing happens to me with pronouns too. One of the most reassuring experiences for me at ISART is how forgiving my students who have transitioned are with me on the few occasions I’ve made those errors.
The media is full of all sorts of distorted ideas about identity-based culture wars happening in the world at the moment. These distorted ideas vilify minority people by depicting them as hostile and inhuman. There is no better antidote to deprogram your mind from the toxic influences of such discourse than to interact with different people.
Being in a position to have such exchanges is one of the great joys of teaching. Being able to support such people — to help them realize their dreams — is THE greatest joy of the job.
As such, I’m currently in my third year of teaching at ISART, with no plans to stop.
The “one last job” of being a career-long teacher is the gift that keeps on giving.
Future post sneak preview:
This piece started out with a different focus about how, in my third year of teaching of with ISART, one of my goal’s has been to find ways to integrate AI into my classroom practice.
So far, it’s been an interesting ride, with lots to share about how I’m using ChatGPT to empower student learning.
Look out for that in a future post!
Today I wanted to give you some context to it all.