Work

What are we doing here?  We are teaching English to students at the Université de Rennes 1.  The Université de Rennes is the big, public university in Brétagne, and it has campuses all over the city.  The "1" means that it is for science students--physics, math, chemistry, biology, economics, computer science, law, philosophy, etc.  Medical students are separate and attend a different sort of university straight out of high school.  There are about 22,000 students at UR1, with 1600 faculty members.  The founding of the whole academy dates back to the fifteenth century, but the university as it is known today only dates back to the late 1960s.  There are twelve sites in the whole UR system, including eight campuses, three research centers, and a museum.

Library at Sciences Éco, housed in
a former monastery.  Photo courtesy
of Wikipedia.com.  

I teach my classes at the Sciences Économiques campus (known as Sciences Éco), which is for the business students.  It is in the heart of the city, and the oldest of the buildings is very pretty; it used to be a monastery for the Carmelites.  I have three classes: one for second-year business students in the normal track and two for second-year business students in the advanced, international section for students planning to work abroad for at least part of their careers.  The students are most definitely quieter than those in the US, but overall they are pleasant and interested in English.  We make all our own curriculum here, so we can choose subjects in which the students are particularly interested.

Beaulieu campus.  Photo courtesy
of ICOM.

Aaron is teaching L2 (second-year) science students and second-year master's students in the mathematics track at the Beaulieu campus.  The math class has not started yet, but he thinks the science students have fairly good English.  Since he's only taught one class, he says it's hard to make any other judgments except that it's strange to teach a language without a textbook.  (Note strange=different, not wrong or bad.)

Next week, we will begin the other part of our job, which is interviewing students who are taking the online version of classes (This semester, these students are L1 and L3, first- and third-year.  Next semester, it will be the L2 students' turn to study at home).  What we have been told (unofficially, mind you, so please feel free to correct us) is that the university budget cannot cover the cost of having all the students in the classroom all year.  We'll let you know how that goes once it begins!

Sometimes at Beaulieu, the instructors ask us to come to their classes to help out.  Aaron is visiting a class for future high school science teachers and has to be taught to give a presentation on volcanoes; then he has to give the presentation to the class and compete with the other American lecturer, Andrew!  I, unfortunately, do not get to participate because I am teaching during the class period.

The other part of our job (and this is the really hard part!) is that we have to lead English Club in the Irish Pub in the city every Monday night.  We even get a special Happy Hour for our participants.  We, the leaders, buy our first drink, and last night they gave us our second free!  Aaron enjoys a good pint, so that was fun for him.  I chose Irish whiskey (Bushmills) and then they gave me their favorite Scotch (I have no idea what it was) for free as my second.  They were very nice, and we had about thirty people there speaking English!  (Aaron adds that many of them were American, either from Andrew's college in New York or other expats from around town).  We even met someone from Madison, Wisconsin, and it was her twenty-second birthday!

Tomorrow, we are planning on taking a trip to Dinan, a walled, Medieval city between Rennes and Saint Malo.  We'll let you know about that soon!