This weekend at the Katia and Kyliemac 200th Episode Live Broadcast + overall extravaganza was super fun and I'm so glad I went. It was great to meet new bloggers and see old ones again, eat some North American style food, and be part of the shenaniganeries. I even won a door prize! I am still so excited about it. I never win anything, and Andromeda had just won something, so I said to her as she was walking back "I hope I win something too!" And then literally ten seconds later I did! A thermal mug thing, courtesy of Breakfast in America. It's the perfect prize because I had been thinking all week that I needed to get one so that I can have hot tea while dealing with the rugrats at 8:30 AM, and of course in France, land of drinks sur place, where would I find something like that for a reasonable price? Well, Saturday was my lucky day, Katia and Kyliemac heard my expat prayers and I am now the proud owner of a super cool mug. I didn't even have to commander it from Santa Claus! So you heard it here first: Katia and Kyliemac are better than Santa Claus.

The excitement and overall excellence of the weekend was followed by the miracle of SNOW, and not just any snow, snow that stuck to the ground! Well, it stuck for about two hours until it started melting and turned to rain. I ran out while it was still pretty snow to take some pictures, so if anyone in the 02 heard tales of a crazy girl running around taking pictures of the snow, that was me. I got some good pictures on the small hill in town where it was colder and there was maybe half an inch of snow, so I'll get those up as soon as possible. I think I was the only (adult) person who found it beautiful and didn't just get freaked out about cleaning off my car and driving in it. Sometimes I feel like I've moved to Georgia, you know, those states that us Northerners always make fun of in the winter when they shut everything down because of a couple of flakes of snow.

I'm trying to ride the wave of these two excellent things going into my day tomorrow at L School (formerly Directeur Napoleon Complex School and home of the infamous Monster Class). Tomorrow for once my main worry isn't the monster class, it's the other teachers. I went to see my conseillère pédagogique on Friday afternoon to ask her for some advice about them and also about dealing with two CE1 classes that have 5 or 6 out of 20 students who are en difficulté (they are slower on the pickup of things like reading and writing and therefore also English). Her suggestion was to divide the classes in two and leave the other half with the teacher so that with the monster class I would (hopefully, although I doubt it) have less discipline problems, and with the CE1 I could spend more time working with individual students. Well, the problem with her plan is that for two of the three classes we're talking about the teachers don't stay in the room with me, so she offered to go to L School and tell the teachers they have to stay in the room with me. She was nice about it, not like "you're violating the rules" but I think it was taken badly at L School. The Directeur and the CE1 teacher are not my biggest fans, and I'm sure they think I went behind their back to criticize them to the Inspection, which is not at all the case. They've probably had fun trashing me (more than usual) this week (because the people at this school are petty like that and always have to have someone to talk about), and I'm a little worried that tomorrow is going to be less than pleasant. But like my mom said, I have to go in with a positive attitude and not feel all defensive, just explain calmly and clearly why I went to go speak to her and how they can help me. I don't work with the directeur this year, so whatever for him, but the CE1 maitresse is your classic screaming, degrading the children, constantly putting down the kids having a tough time French teacher, so I don't really want her involved with my class, but I may have to let her in a little. I bet she's really going to crack down on the kids now.

And I know it would have been better if I told them myself that they need to stay in the class with me, but if I haven't done it for he past year, I'm definitely not about to do it now. I'm very shy about these kinds of things. So I will hope that I can clean up the mess that I made. On verra.