Theatre

Three afternoons a week, I worked with a troupe of eight students to prepare our short play, “L’anglais tel qu’on le parle.” To break the ice at the beginning of the summer, we spent some time playing improvisation and concentration games, but the bulk of our time was spent working on pronunciation, memorization, and blocking. At the goodbye show, when the students performed the play, they understood the humor of the play sufficiently to transmit the jokes to the audience, who laughed in all the right places (and maybe a few others).

Sports

One day a week, the entire group of instructors and students went down to the beach for sports such as volleyball, soccer, and ultimate frisbee; in poorer weather, we had the use of a large gymnasium. Sports day was a chance for me to teach in a different way. I am very active and enjoy a number of exercise formats, especially running and yoga. In nice weather, I took a group of students for runs along the beach, and indoors, I led a yoga session. Many of the girls had done yoga before, and enjoyed learning the names of the asanas and meditating in French.

Support groups

One or two days a week, instead of phonetics, our small groups met to discuss their challenges, triumphs, questions, and concerns about living in a foreign country. It was important to me that my students feel comfortable confiding in me; something that helped was that they knew that I had been an exchange student too when I was their age, and they could trust that whatever they might feel, I had been through it, too. Fortunately no one in my group had any truly serious problems; instead, we shared some good laughs over oddities like the buttons for flushing the toilet, and reflected on the cultural differences between their family experiences in Brest and in Indiana.