Hello again!

It has been quite some time since I've written on here, and unfortunately no news wasn't good news. I've had some really tough stuff to deal with over the past couple of weeks, and I'm honestly not sure if I'm going to be able to finish my contract. It depends on how well I can handle these other issues (which are medical) in addition to my job, and if the other issues make me so miserable that it's not worthwhile for me to stay. I'm not even sure that I want to stay. But this week is vacation, the Toussaint, or All Saints vacation, so I'm going to try to enjoy my free time and remind myself why I wanted to come here in the first place. My only current plan is to be in Paris next weekend and explore that city, and in the meantime maybe some day trips. If anyone has any suggestions, please pass them along.

Other than these non-job related issues, things here are good overall. I can't emphasize enough how kind everyone in Soissons has been to me, especially with all of this other stuff going on. My conseillere pedagogique continues to be wonderful, as well as everyone at the Inscription (school district offices), and at my schools the teachers are really nice to me too. The directeur in one school in particular is just so nice to me. The kids are cute, although on Thursday they were totally nuts. They obviously knew that vacation was coming, and I was just doing Halloween games with them so it was a rather chaotic day. In one school I'm sort of tag-teaming the English teaching with the CE2/CM1 teacher because he's qualified to teach English and I actually find that really helpful. Since I have no teaching experience, it's really good to be able to see how he goes about teaching. It gives me lots of ideas and steers me in the right direction. I think that after the break I may ask if I can do some observation of another teacher who is habilite in English, and also ask this teacher if we can do more teaching together. What we do right now is brainstorm general topics together and then split the class in half and each do a different activity, and I think I'd like to have a week or two where I could be an actual teaching assistant, rather than an actual teacher. During vacation I should probably do some planning for the last six weeks of the year, so I have some direction.

I'm feeling a little lonely and homesick these days, as I'm sure all assistants and everyone who has ever been away can relate to. It's just hard to be thousands of miles away from the people you care about the most and who care about you the most. But like I said above, it's vacation and I'm going to try to make the best of it.