Montessori school shelves with toys. Photo: 3neus

In a three-part blog Camille Bromley describes a day in the life of a teacher at the Montessori International School of Grenoble. Read part I.

7:38 am

Bus stop, Place Verdun.  As the number 31 bus to Meylan: Maupertius approaches I’m hastily devouring the remaining third of my Big Chocolate, freshly purchased for 1 euro from Sandwich House located behind the Maison de Tourisme tram stop, outgoing side. Ordinarily the Big Chocolates from this Sandwich House are not especially good pain au chocolat, but they’re easily the size of two regular pain au chocolat, a good bargain at 1 euro (the American in me is always a sucker for bargains), and in the morning when they’re warm they’re still pretty darn tasty.

The Big Chocolate is the ritual first step in my once-weekly workday as an English teacher at Montessori International Primary School in Meylan, as this is the only day in the week I exit the house early enough to catch one while still warm. The other days of the week I work as an English assistant in public primary schools.

Teaching at Montessori International School is not like teaching in French public school.  It’s vastly different, in fact.  If you’re not familiar with what’s called the Montessori Method, I’ll briefly explain: The Montessori Method of children’s education was originally developed in the early 20th century by an Italian educator named Maria Montessori. It’s an alternative approach to schooling, encouraging a child’s individual self-directed learning using the support of materials and teacher observation. 

From what I understand, while many schools worldwide function under the heading of Montessori School there are no defined guidelines for the specific practical application of this education system. However, the general idea is that children learn best when they follow their natural instincts and interests. In other words, it’s self-study for kids; less academically-put, the kids do what they feel like.

This “do-what-you-feel-like” philosophy is most decidedly not the norm in French public schools, from what I’ve seen in my year’s experience there, the essential part of a teacher’s oral utterances consisting of phrases such as, non, tu n’as pas le droit!; vous levez la doigt pour avoir la parole!; TAISEZ-VOUS! [yelled shockingly loud]; vous êtes insupportables aujourd’hui! [tone of resignation and accompanying sigh]; and finally the much-loved Bravo!, with exaggerated sarcasm. Thus, Montessori International reputedly offers an alternative to parents who prefer their kids to receive more positive encouragement than negative during the first 6–9 years of their educational development.

However, I haven’t given an entirely clear picture of the Montessori International School in Meylan. This school is foremost an international school, with instruction provided in French and English. I am the English-instruction teacher (on Mondays anyways), and a woman with a confounding last name, Martine Grzelak, functions as school director and French-instruction teacher. 

We take care of the primary-age children, age 6–12. The children in this group, about 25 of them, are mostly Francophone, with a solid group of Anglophones and couple French-English bilingual kids. There is another, separate class of students at the school, the pre-school age group (ages 3–6), also Francophone or Anglophone or both, headed by Emilie Ballivy. The pre-schoolers are called Les petits castors, which gives an accurate impression of their work ethic and focused accomplishment under the guidance of Ms. Ballivy.

The school makes use of an impressive collection of Montessori materials and supplies, and the curriculum is organized around the French National Education program, so that children are expected to cover a similar material to public school students. More on the Montessori Method as the day progresses.

Part II

Part III

Part III

12:00 pm

Lunchtime. The microwave cart is wheeled in, desks are cleared, chairs fetched. The students eat in the classroom. The children are expected to be settled quietly in their chairs, ask to go wash their hands, and then ask to get their lunchboxes before they are allowed to eat. Meanwhile, the child in charge of setting the table this week goes to get the silverware and dishes.   

12:30 pm

Everyone is finally sitting and has more or less the complete tableware set in front of them: plate, fork, knife, little yogurt spoon, and plastic cup (Martine’s cabinet has slowly but surely been rid of all the glassware glasses, not intentionally).

The table setting procedure always takes much longer than is logically necessary, probably because the child assigned to set the table is for some reason 90% of the time the same small boy, who due to his diminutive size and severely ADD nature seems the absolute worst person in the room to give the task of distributing various separate pieces of cutlery to students sitting in disorganized clumps around the big room, not to mention that when you see him trying to lug the heavy glass water pitchers around to each table you get the sinking sense of futility of watching someone trying very hard to complete a Sisyphean task. Half the pitcher will have been emptied on the floor by the time he gets to the table, and he’ll be sent to get more in five minutes.

I send the children in groups of two or three to the cloakroom to get their lunchboxes. I imagine that you can tell a lot about the home life of individual children from their lunchboxes. A lot of the older children seem to have the freedom to creatively fashion their own concept of a meal; there’s a group of three girls (who aggressively defy the assertion that social cliques don’t exist in small schools) that bring their lunches in family-style portions to share with each other: a bag of Lay’s potato chips, a Tupperware box of pasta and sauce, an entire sleeve of Speculoos cookies.

The Anglophone children belong to a different breed of household, one that clearly holds in contempt the irresponsible consumption of low nutrient-to-calorie ratio foods and environmentally unfriendly packaging. S—, a six-year-old with extraordinary feminine style (how a child of that age is able to exude such class is beyond me), declares matter-of-factly that she hates ice cream and cake. Her treat of choice is the green pressed seaweed paper that sushi rolls come wrapped in — in French it’s translated as algae, which expresses better, I think, the total bizarreness of a six-year-old reveling in the taste of a seaweed wrap (imagine an apple cheeked little girl saying with a charming missing-front-tooth smile, “My favorite food is algae”).  

1:15 pm

The kids are fairly hopping to get outside after a full morning of being together in one room. They go into the cloakroom to remove their slippers and put on their outside shoes, most of which resemble work boots or what English people call “wellies” rather than the slick bright white Pumas or the metallically shiny girl-sized heels (!) public school children wear. This is because the playground provided for amusement and the venting of various child frustrations during the lunch recess is not actually a playground, it’s an empty field behind the Montessori school building accessible only by a quick jump across a ditch (a wide step for you or me, a brief air-bound thrill for the 11-year-olds, and an unbreachable chasm for the 3-year-olds, who nevertheless enjoy the jump immensely so long as you’re holding their hand.

Supervising, I can’t help thinking that innovative playground developers, with their tangle of curved colored bars and knotted rope systems, are entirely missing the point — the kids have more fun rolling around in the grass and throwing rocks at trees than with any preconstructed equipment education authorities can buy. I’m reminded how innocent and sweet children are at heart when I hear G— and S— playing a sort of tag-zombie game which seems to consist of yelling “I’m going to suck your brain!” and attempting to grab the skull of another player.

2:00 pm

Emilie and I file the children back into school, past the company workers in button up shirts and pencil skirts taking their smoke break. Monday afternoon is devoted to art class and Spanish class, and the children are sent in small groups to participate in those activities. Otherwise, the students can continue the projects of the morning. The students complete impressive individual projects throughout the year that don’t sacrifice depth or quality for the lack of collaborators.

S— is working on a postcard project; she’s contacting friends and acquaintances across the U.S., asking them to send her postcards at the Montessori school address, teaching her about their town or state. She’s gathered a large number of postcards and will organize them into a visual presentation. O— has completed a project about the state of Israel, its history, people, and culture, and the poster is hanging on the classroom wall.

One of the goals of the Montessori school is to effectively link all subjects together in the child’s mind; to create a truly interdisciplinary understanding of the world. This objective makes for very creative project ideas, and the results are evident in the variety of student-made artwork and presentations on display around the school.

3:30 pm

The school day is over, but many students will stay for the next one to two hours, playing the gymnasium or participating in an activity Martine or Emilie has organized. I, however, say my rounds of “See you next week” and am out the door.

The next day I’ll be at one of the public primary schools in Grenoble. Not being an education expert, I’m not going to offer my judgment of the effectiveness of the education system in public schools compared to the Montessori approach. The purposes and needs of the two school systems are vastly different and require different methods of teaching and classroom management. Montessori schools may give more individual attention, but they also provide a lot less guidance and structure. This may or may not work well, depending on the character of each individual child. One thing I do know, however, is that I’ll be doing a lot more yelling in my public school.

Part I

Part II

For more information:
http://www.montessori-grenoble.com/UK/school-montessori-grenoble.htm
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Montessori

Part II

8:12 am

Terminus on the number 31 bus line. The bus halts in front of a grouping of new, enterprise-y looking buildings with big reflective glass windows framed in a shade of blue that suggests innovation and forward-thinking. The school is rather unexpectedly housed in one of these buildings, towards the back of the complex, sharing quarters with some kind of company that requires men and women in business attire to enter and exit through the same doors as the free-spirited, frequently-in-high-speed-motion Montessori kids.

The school is essentially three large rooms, the primary schoolroom, the pre-school room, and the gym, which is carpeted and doubles as an art studio and Spanish nook. There is also Martine’s office, a nap room for the preschoolers, a storage room, and a cloakroom where the children hang their coats, bags, and change their shoes into indoor shoes. They are only allowed to wear slippers inside the school, as it is carpeted. This reminds me of Japanese schools, except that here the children are allowed to bring their own slippers. In Japan the slippers are part of the uniforms and must be regulation color and design.

8:45 am

The kids wander in the room one by one and are by this time more or less all present. After some general comments and reminders, Martine starts the weekly routine of designating “responsibilities” onto each child. This is performed by use of a chart listing cleaning tasks to be completed each day and a small canvas sack containing the names of each child on Velcro tabs.

It took me a few months to figure out that the responsibility entitled Muffin referred to the class hamster. Insisting that the responsibilities be assigned by a random pull from the bag, Martine cheats openly on her own rule by fishing for names that she believes merit a particular nasty chore this week. The kids either suffer tremendously from the injustice of this favoritism or get a kick out of it, depending on how you choose to interpret the situation.

The responsibilities I find to be an ingenious system for ensuring an attitude of collective care and respect from all the students towards the cleaning and upkeep of the school room and materials. By being allowed to choose, in a fashion, what chore they do each week the child is given some autonomy and feels like she’s making a voluntary decision to contribute. This is probably a distinctive Montessori touch. Japanese schoolchildren also clean the school as part of their daily duties, although there they are responsible for the bathrooms as well, which I remain convinced is a mistake (imagine how what kind of clean job a second-grader might do on a bathroom — then repeat that every day for the whole year).

8:52 am

Work time. The children are either broken up into groups or sent to a desk to work individually. All the primary school kids, from 6 to 12, work in the same room, some in groups and some independently, and they pursue different activities. Martine keeps an eye on all of them and remains aware of how they’re doing and what progress they’re making, a remarkable feat for about 15 different students and different levels.

There are no set subject periods or age groups. The children have more or less the choice to work on one activity the entire morning or change subjects freely. There’s no morning recess, although there is a snack, which the children are expected to provide, following a rotation schedule. If the children tire of one activity and want to do some less-strenuous but still constructive activity such as reading, it is permitted within reason.

I take the group of English speakers. There are two first grade girls, a third grader, a fifth grader, and sometimes a first grade boy. We either do a language-arts activity all together, harder versions adapted for the third and fifth graders, or I split them up to work in pairs or alone. It’s my choice based on what we’re doing that day and how well the children are working together. When the English speakers take breaks to work on another subject, I choose a group of French children to do an English language lesson.

11:00 am

With Martine in the room, the classroom functions smoothly. With some notable exceptions, the children work quietly, although their rate of productivity is subject to debate. Clearly, some children are more ideal Montessori students than others. A group of three boys writes a bilingual dialogue together concerning an inept motorist and a driving instructor for their upcoming play. Another boy does French grammar exercises on the computer. A girl visualizes multiplication with wooden beads and a counting board.

Meanwhile, little G— sulks at his desk, complaining that his work is “too hard” and he doesn’t “understand nuffing,” and I— doodles on the margins of his essay and gazes out the window. I remind I— to get back to his work and Martine appears over G—‘s shoulder to investigate the veracity of his claim.

Part I

Part III

Guida Bulba: Corps & Voix

Grenoble Life’s Shonah Kennedy meets Guida Bulha of Corps et Voix, a trainer and consultant in oral communication.

As a teacher I have the privilege to meet a vast array of people.  I am constantly amazed, entertained and, more often than not, pleasantly surprised.  One of the people I had the pleasure of meeting was Guida Bulha of Corps et Voix.  Below Guida explains what she does, how she does it and what benefit it could be for you.

Shonah: How do you describe what you do?

Guida Bulha: Well, I am a trainer and a consultant in the oral communication area – working the body and the voice.

Shonah: What does the process do for people?

Guida: This helps people to speak with greater confidence and conviction, and communicate more effectively in both business and social environments.

Shonah: What have been some benefits for past clients?

Guida: To develop their self-esteem has permitted some of them to find new customers.  For some public speaking with more confidence and for others to find jobs, etc.

Put simply: to develop their skills in their professional field.

Shonah: How did you start in your business? What is your background?

Guida: I began my career as a language teacher and translator; after that, I worked in several companies. Today I bring together my experience in international business, communication and marketing, and my experience in the voice field.

Guida Bulha working with a client

Shonah: When did you start doing this line of work and why?

Guida: I started in April 2008. More than ten years ago, I participated in a vocal workshop. There, I discovered that the voice – my passion – was much more than a simple emission of sounds. The voice is “something” fragile and powerful. It was a great surprise for me. Therefore, I decided to push my discovery further and I undertook training in this area.

Shonah: What is the link with workshops or training sessions – such as public speaking, telephone interactions, front-line workers, sales, team building – and the body and the voice?

Guida: People who work in these areas use their voices to communicate.  You know, the most important part when you communicate is the non-verbal language, and that the voice is embodied in … the body. To equilibrate these three parts of communication. I mean; the body, the voice and the word, are fundamental. If you want to be heard and understood.

Shonah: How long have you been in Grenoble?

Guida: I have been here for 19 years. I saw the mountains and I fell in love.

Shonah: How do you help people to help themselves?

Guida: I help them to find – or to be conscious – that they have in themselves the resources to communicate. I accompany people to find the confidence in themselves.

Shonah: What are your plans for the future? 

Guida:  Well, I want to develop in other directions. I think particularly in the English speaking community. I want to propose to them workshops and training sessions to improve French or to improve their skills in public speaking or other themes. In French or in English. It is also possible to work the voice to sing or to speak. Just to find the pleasure to be confident.

Shonah: Thanks so much to Guida.  If you would like to contact Guida for further information you can do so through her website at Guida Bulha Corps et Voix.

Guida Bulha in action

Judith Bouvard, Dean of Grenoble Graduate School of Business

Grenoble Life talks to Judith Bouvard, Dean of Grenoble Graduate School of Business, about her background, the changing business and training environment in France, and why students should consider coming to Grenoble.

Grenoble Life: Where do you come from originally?

Judith Bouvard: I was born in a small town near Manchester in the North of England. 

GL: Why did you come to Grenoble ?

Judith: When I left Manchester I went to live in Romans in the Drôme, to work in the luxury shoe industry. After a couple of years there I came to live in Grenoble to resume my studies.

GL: What kind of work did you first do on arrival in Grenoble ?

Judith: When I arrived in Grenoble at the same time as I was studying I was working part-time for a UK firm as a marketing consultant helping them to develop the market of protective clothing for building sites and road works. I then started to work in the training and continuing education business by doing some teaching and helping some French companies to set up in-house training courses.

Then I started working at ESC Grenoble – this was the name of the school before we became ‘Grenoble Ecole de Management (GEM)’. I was involved with the school right from the day it was founded and I was even a member of the entrance juries for the Grande Ecole program before the building was finished.

I started teaching at the school and little by little I increased my contributions by developing the international relations. Then, in 1995, I created the Master in International Business (MIB), which was the first international program to be offered by GEM. I really felt there was a niche market for such an Master in Management program taught in English in Grenoble.

I gradually introduced more international degree programs taught through the medium of English and continued to develop the portfolio of international programs until GGSB became one of the schools of GEM.     

Parallel to that I continued my studies on the Henley DBA program and also obtained a Postgraduate Diploma in Management Consultancy.

GL: What three professional achievements are you most proud of?

Judith: Developing a whole new international school from nothing and setting up all the programs; putting Grenoble on the map in international rankings, such as those of the prestigious Financial Times. I am also very proud of the careers and success stories of our graduates further to qualifications that I designed.

GL: Apart from the quality of the course programmes on offer at GGSB, why should potential students consider coming to Grenoble?

Judith: They should certainly consider coming for the dynamic nature of the city. It is easy to get by in Grenoble for non-French speakers. There is not a day that goes by without me hearing English on the street. However, most of our students become quite fluent in French rather rapidly as they experience true French culture. Our students are also sure to build a large international network of friends they can rely on in the future due to the fantastic diversity of the student population at GGSB.

GL: You have created partnerships between GGSB and schools around the world, including those in Iran and Saudi Arabia. As a woman, did you face any challenges in this respect?

Judith: The challenge was for me to actually challenge the pre-conceived ideas of what people had warned me about in advance. In those countries, people actually respect you for your intellect, status and qualifications regardless of your gender. Qualifications come above anything else and with more and more women gaining higher education degrees, the challenge for them is lessening. The other challenge was the dress code, but only from a comfort point of view. Wearing a head scarf when it is 40 degrees outside can be quite uncomfortable when you are not used to that!

GL: How has the business environment changed since you arrived in France, and how has GGSB contributed to this change?

Judith: Over the past 30 years, I have seen more international exchanges – both academic and corporate – and better means to conduct these exchanges, thanks to technology. Technology has definitely changed the way people do business. We can now work with different parts of the world without feeling that it is far away. For example I can be talking to a colleague in China or Singapore in the morning and to another colleague in Mexico in the evening. Of course the result is that the working day can be quite long!

At GGSB, we train qualified managers capable of working beyond national borders with a multitude of cultures and ethnic backgrounds. Our graduates are increasingly working in virtual teams spread over different countries. The contact with colleagues all around the world definitely adds a different dimension to business. 

GL: How has the learning and training environment changed?

Judith: We now have access to more information, thanks to the internet. What used to be called a ‘correspondence course’ is now called a ‘distance learning course’; technology has made learning more user-friendly. Furthermore, whereas years ago classes were made of one single nationality, the learning environment has become highly international, offering numerous opportunities for students.

Also the faculty members have become more like facilitators than lecturers. At GGSB gone are the days of long monologues by a lecture standing in front of the students. Now there is far more interaction and exchange between the lecturer and the students. Also I think that business schools have realised that it is important to have a good blend of lecturers with a more academic approach and business professionals who bring their work experience to the classroom.

GL: What is next for you and the school?

Judith: I’m very excited about our new Global Executive MBA that will begin in January 2011. This new course will run in eight different locations: Grenoble – Geneva – Moscow – London – New York – Singapore – New Delhi – Beijing, and is aimed at top managers who will travel to each location for specific courses and country case-studies.

This Global EMBA is the result of all the knowledge I’ve acquired over the years, after observing how companies function and their different needs. I’m also an AMBA auditor, so I’ve got to examine various programs, their pluses and minus.

I’m also preparing the future of GGSB when I will no longer be there to ensure the continuity of GGSB. I’m busy getting the right people in so the school will keep the same prestige and have the possibility of progressing. I’m proud as I see the next generation come in to be trained by GGSB. Often, children of those who I taught come to seek advice and are keen to live the same enriching experience at GGSB as their parents did.

Helen McEwan (left) with children joining in on English Talk Radio

The May 21 English Talk Radio show features Helen McEwan of ABC Anglais, and took place at Les Petits Bilingues, Grenoble.

Listen to the show: here

English Talk Radio is a talk show in English on 90.8 Radio Campus Grenoble. We talk about film, theatre, finance, restaurants, travel, and have a variety of topical guests. There are four presenters: Kristine Minski talks about finance, Christina Menez talks about China, Mary Zaccai talks about student issues, and Vivian Draper – animatrice/rédactrice – hosts the show. Every Sunday at 12.30pm, and every Wednesday at 7pm on 90.8, Radio Campus Grenoble and live on www.campusgrenoble.org – and also here on Grenoble Life.

A map to Association Babel

Claire Bryars is President of Babel, a language and cultural exchange association in the centre of Grenoble. She tells us about the organisation, its activities and its history.

Babel is an association founded in 1978 by a handful of people who wanted to develop and promote language teaching and cultural exchanges in France and abroad.  

I was one of the founding members and have been President since 2003. As a teacher I have also organised intensive English courses and accompanied groups to England and Wales.

When we started we were extremely fortunate to be provided with a room in the heart of Grenoble, next to the Couvent des Minimes where we have been ever since.

The activities have been very varied over the years but from the very beginning we have given language lessons (English, French for foreigners, German, Italian, Japanese, Russian, Spanish) and had conversation groups.

We have also organised seminars, intensive adult courses, children’s classes, teacher training sessions, trips to England, Wales and Italy, had play readings, cultural evenings and produced a monthly newspaper (The Newssheet) which eventually became Breakaway.

For a few months we also presented a weekly radio programme. There is also of course the Library, an important part of our association. It was created in 2000 with the aid of Alliance Grenoble Oxford and Open House and is housed in Babel.

All the above activities are available to members and their friends who may also attend the cultural evenings. We have an Open Day in September and a yearly Christmas party. A monthly letter informs members of the coming events and a website has recently been set up.

Coming up next at Babel there is an inter-cultural evening (Italian/Spanish) on the 27th May followed by a trip to Italy. The Open Day is the 11th September (14h–18h) and Babel will participate in the Journées Européennes du Patrimoine on the 18th and 19th September with other associations housed in the Quartier du Vieux Temple. We hope to see you there!

A permanent member of staff is present on Tuesdays (12h15–13h45) during the library opening hours. Otherwise anyone wishing to join can leave a telephone message (04 76 42 43 91) or send an e-mail (association.babel@ laposte.net).

URSSAF - another elegant French acronym

Patrick Owen shares his experience starting an English teaching business, becoming an Auto-entrepreneur and dealing with France’s particular administrative complexity and love of acronyms.  

So as I come to the end of my ACCRE, I’ve contacted the URSSAF who told me to contact the APCE.  I also contacted the RSI and the CIPAV but had no response.  Therefore I sent an email to the CNAVPL.  I must, also, remember to send my annual report to the DRTEPF.  If all of this sounds like double Dutch, welcome to my world, since I started my own business.  I knew the French administration loved acronyms having lived in France for eight years, dealing with the CAF, EDF, GDF, etc.  However, when I set up my own company I entered a whole new ball game. 

After working in various language schools I decided to work for myself.  Everyone warned me against it; “It’s really complicated,” and, “The charges are really high,” were just two of the comments I heard.  It is amazing that France has so many small businesses, when you hear all the negative reactions.  In the beginning, I wasn’t sure what type of business to create with various projects in mind.  However, I soon discovered that in France, once you have trained to do one thing changing direction is not easy. Changing careers involves financial and time investments that I did not have.  I therefore decided to set up a language teaching business, since this was what I knew best. 

Now, it might be useful to explain why I had decided to set up my own business.  Many language schools will employ teachers on freelance contracts, as I had discovered during my first year in France.  The problem is that to work for a business school or university, where the better pay rates are, you need a principal employer.  In addition, for a reason that I can only speculate at, few employers are willing to sign the paper agreeing to be your principal employer.  There are two solutions: one is to use a société de portage, the other is to be your own employer.  The société de portage acts as your employer, in the sense that they take care of all the administrative paperwork, of course for this service they take a fee.  My feeling was that the fee charged didn’t really justify the work involved,  I therefore decided to set up for myself. 

I attended an event held by my local Chamber of Commerce, which didn’t turn out to be much help.  I was unable to get answers to my questions and, as I was not setting up a commercial activity, they were not the right people to ask.  In the end, it was internet forums that proved to be the most help.  I typed my questions into Google and sifted through the responses.  It was here that I learnt I would have to see the URSSAF.  They seem to be the organisation that catches the companies who are not commercial or tradesmen.  I also discovered that provided I didn’t earn too much and didn’t employ anyone else, the process was fairly simple. 

I printed a form on the internet and headed for the URSSAF.  I had been told I didn’t need an appointment.  This worried me slightly, as I had experienced the queues at the Social Security and the Prefecture.  I was pleasantly surprised to be received within ten minutes of my arrival by a pleasant and helpful adviser.  She rapidly entered my details and answered my questions, in less than an hour I was in business, literally.  She offered me a free appointment with an accountant and, best of all, showed me I was eligible for a dispensation of social taxes for one year.  I left the URSSAF with a whole different image of the French administration. 

The dispensation for one year is important and a big helping hand.  Normally a company’s charges are fixed for the first and second years.  Then the third year’s charges are calculated on the real income of the second year.  The problem is that, although, the first year’s charges are relatively light, in the second they double and this kills a lot of small businesses.  Now, certain categories of business creators, the unemployed for example, can ask for a first year free of charges.  I qualified because, although I resigned, I had been looking after my kids one day a week and received income support.  This taught me that you have to read everything because there is often an advantageous exception which you may not always be told about. 

While surfing the internet, I also discovered that if I wanted to teach in companies I would need to make a déclaration d’activité with the DRTEFP (Direction Régionale du Travail, de l’Emploi et de la Formation Professionnelle).  In France, companies are obliged to pay a tax towards the training of their employees.  This tax is often collected by organisations which manage the training funds.  These organisations will only accept training courses run by companies who have made the declaration.  Many people wrongly refer to it as an agreement, however the DRTEFP are very strict in their literature that it is not an agreement from the state, merely a declaration.  

I discovered that with the right documentation, a curriculum vitae, a casier judiciaire vierge (a document you can order online showing you have never committed a crime), and your first training contract the procedure was straightforward.  It is the contract which can be a little complicated, if you haven’t got a declaration number how can you sign a contract?  I got around this problem by noting that my declaration was being processed, and offering my first client a clause whereby if I didn’t get the number the contract was null and void. 

I treated starting my business rather as a challenge and as time went on it became a puzzle, for which I was never sure I had all the pieces.  To be honest I enjoyed pitting myself against the French administration and proving those who said it would be hard to do wrong.  It must be said that I chose the simplest possible structure and being a teacher, who teaches in companies, I have very few overheads. 

It is worth mentioning in conclusion that a law was passed in 2008 making it even easier for freelance teachers.  The status of Auto-entrepreneur is designed for people who may have multiple employers as well as working for themselves.  The process of setting up is very simple and can even be done online.  The real boost however comes in terms of charges and tax.  The Auto-entrepreneur can choose to declare his turnover each month or trimester.  The social charges and tax are calculated based on what he declares and paid immediately.  This avoids the nasty bills arriving one year after a good year.  It also means that if you have a month with no income you pay nothing.  This regime is much more sensible for someone like me. 

Unfortunately, and here is the downside of my experience, getting information about this new status has been hard.  I have read the law and the Auto-entrepreneur’s handbook.  As a sole trader I can ask to benefit from the same regime, and I have done so which brings us back to the beginning of the article.  The acronyms are all the people I have contacted to ask for help changing my status.  

On the whole my experience has been positive; the principal problem has been people.  Everything one needs to know is on the internet.  When dealing with employees of the various administrations it is a case of pot luck.  The first person I saw was excellent, others have been less so.  I once made the mistake of phoning on the day of a strike, my call was answered after prolonged ringing by a harassed and unhelpful lady.  I blame myself for this one, though, after three years in France I should have known you don’t phone the public service on strike days, I was lucky someone answered.  My advice is to be determined, do your research and treat the experience as fun, and you will be fine. 

Patrick Owen
www.englishcoach38.com
letter-from-france.blogspot.com

Still searching for the right path in Grenoble?

Grenoble Life’s Shonah Kennedy shares her experience of coming to the city on the “coat-tails” of her husband and discovering she was not the only woman in Grenoble who had temporarily placed their life on hold to be with the man of their dreams.

Heading back to Grenoble after a mini-break in Switzerland I wondered why I felt a little apprehensive. Then it hit me. I was going back to Grenoble AND going back to work! That is right – after what seemed like a formidably long time – I have a job! So, on the return journey to Grenoble, and inevitably to work, my thoughts were consumed by the metaphorical journey I took to get to where I was … it felt like a round-the-world trip, with multiple stopovers!

Until I had coffee with a lovely American girl, I felt that I was on the aforementioned sojourn alone – I imagined I had been the only one ever to have temporarily placed my life on hold to be with the man of my dreams, to live his dreams for a while, as mine simmered on some distant stove-top. However, as we chatted it emerged that she had decided to take a slight detour from the road she was traveling on when her husband received a job offer here. I felt relieved – even though she had been through many of the bureaucratic and emotional ups and downs that I had had to endure – as I was not alone anymore. Actually I would come to learn that the round-the-world was almost over-booked!

Even though my dear husband was very supportive and really encouraged me to get “out there” and look for the job I now have, and be able to write about it here, I really felt as if I had started this metaphorical travel with no preparation – I hadn’t purchased the latest guide book, I didn’t know the sites to see and I didn’t even think to take a language course … so when I ended up on the road, I felt as nervous as if I was going to hitchhike solo the whole way, and just hope that I arrived at the destination I was intended for.

After the coffee with my, now, dear American friend I started thinking there must be others out there like me, wandering around in the wilderness of a round-the-world which wasn’t entirely self motivated. In fact, I found a conglomerate of women living lives they would otherwise not have expected.

Now I have a job, in a profession I adore, and feel a somewhat useful part of society my lost days are few and far between. However, I have spoken to some women who still feel lost, after many years of being here. The decision was not entirely theirs in the first instance, to move to Grenoble, they “followed” – for want of a better word – their husbands here and have never really found their Grenoble feet. These women left good jobs, independence and a place where they felt at home to be with the one they love, but sadly the love of the town has never found them.

Then there are the women who have had a wonderful transition (are these the ones who acquired an upgrade to first class on their round-the-world, I wonder?!) and have not felt as if they have given up their path in lieu of their partner’s, but more taken a segue for a limited period and see many positives in the entirety of the adventure – new place, new language, new friends and an experience they would not otherwise have had.

After speaking to many women (and I know I keep mentioning women, it is not that I assume this situation only happens to women, but during my discussions on the topic of partners following partners, I only heard two separate rumours about men who came to Grenoble because their wives had jobs here) being in Grenoble for many different reasons – marriage, husband’s job, husband’s contract, boyfriend’s research etc. – I came to the conclusion that even though we are all on the same metaphorical journey we will all come home with different travel stories. Some may suffer from travel sickness, while others don’t. Some are in first class, while there are many of us in an overcrowded economy. Some get the interactive TV screens, while for some it is offline for a while, and they must wait for it to be reset. Whatever the situation the journey itself is seemingly memorable.

I would like to thank all the women who shared their stories with me, and I would like to make you aware that each of you has enhanced my round-the-world more than you will know!

Upstage website

The March 10 English Talk Radio show was recorded at the Cité Scolaire Internationale de Grenoble, and includes an interview with the director, the cast and the crew of Upstage, which is putting on two plays: Loot by Joe Orton and Mountain Language by Harold Pinter, performing March 22–27 at 7:30 pm at the Théâtre Ste-Marie-d’en-Bas.

English Talk Radio is a talk show in English on 90.8 Radio Campus Grenoble. We talk about film, theatre, finance, restaurants, travel, and have a variety of topical guests. We are four presenters: Kristine Minski talks about finance, Christina Menez talks about China, Mary Zaccai talks about student issues, and Vivian Draper – animatrice/rédactrice – hosts the show. Every Sunday at 12.30pm, and every Wednesday at 7pm on 90.8, Radio Campus Grenoble and live on www.campusgrenoble.org – and also here on Grenoble Life.

Listen to the full show: here

Just landed in Grenoble? Don't worry, there's a club for you. Photo: Guillaume Brialon

Just landed in Grenoble? Grenoble Life editor James Dalrymple gives his rough guide to Grenoble’s expat clubs and Anglophone businesses and services.

I have been asked by the French Entrée website to write a post with general advice for expats in Grenoble and the surrounding area, including relevant clubs and associations to join. Where to begin? Maybe you have already heard claims that Grenoble has one of the biggest Anglophone communities of any French city. I’m not sure of the real stats, and I will resist the temptation to invent some here, but suffice to say you stand a good chance of meeting other English-speakers whether you wish to or not.

It can be a bone of contention. Some people get defensive about the expat thing, saying something along the lines of, “I didn’t come to France to meet other [insert relevant English-speaking nationality here], I came to meet French people etc.” I don’t really subscribe to this view. When I lived in the UK, I always gravitated towards people who were very international in their outlook, and counted many cultures among those I called my friends. Just because I came to live in France, doesn’t mean that I should only spend time with French people just to feel good about myself. Among the expat groups and associations listed below, one may find many Anglo-French couples, so-called ‘third culture kids’, and all manner of general pan-European activity that belies the widely held view of what expat communities are.

Most new English-speaking Grenoble residents, particularly those with families, are likely to encounter Open House, the city’s long-established and possibly largest expat association. Among the activities Open House organizes are children’s parties, excursions, wine tastings, lunches, outdoor activities, book groups, coffee meetings and French-English language exchange.

The more student-orientated Happy People 38 organizes intercultural social events and language exchanges. Meanwhile, Celtic Connection promotes Irish and Scottish culture and sport in Grenoble and hosts Hallowe’en and St Patrick’s parties, a Burns’ supper, and summer picnics. Scottish expats and a host of other nationals can also be found at a weekly Knitting Bee at Café Leyritz, Place Vaucanson, every Tuesday afternoon at 2pm.

Although not Anglophone I feel duty-bound to make you aware of the lovely people at Le Club Danemark – Rhône Alpes, who are known to organise Glögg parties, Danish lessons and excursions, including cross country skiing. For more info contact: danemark-rhonealpes@live.com

English Talk Radio, presented by Vivian Draper, is a bi-monthly show on 90.8 Radio Campus Grenoble.  The show talks about film, theatre, finance, restaurants and travel, and has a variety of topical local guests; every Sunday at 12.30pm, and every Wednesday at 7pm on 90.8, Radio Campus Grenoble.

For those expats who want their young children to have plenty of contact with the English language, there are some associations which can help with this, including Communication Café and ABC Anglais. Alternatively, French language classes for adults can be obtained from a variety of institutions and associations outlined in depth here.

If you are looking for American or British style cakes there is The Cake Shop and Bookworm Café. The latter also hosts book and poetry groups, language classes, local artists’ exhibitions and occasional musical performances. They also buy and sell second-hand English books, and have English newspapers and magazines to peruse. Furthermore, if you meet French friends yet to be convinced of the potential merits of American cuisine, Pumpkins might be wise place to convert them.

If you can’t find the book you are looking for at Bookworm Café there are two Anglophone libraries, La Bibliotèque Anglophone de Meylan and the English Library at Babel, which also runs book groups for teenagers and adults. Many municipal libraries also have English-language selections, particularly the International Public Library.

Given the dubious French proclivity for dubbing foreign language films into la langue maternelle, you may want to exercise caution when going to the cinema. Le Club (rue du Phalanstère) and La Nef (boulevard Edouard-Rey) are two theatres with dependably interesting programmes, all in version originale. For more info on the city’s movie theatres and film festivals, check out this comprehensive guide.

For church-goers, members from about 10 different denominations and 15 nationalities are welcome to attend The English Speaking Church of Grenoble, which also has a programme of social activities including dances, crafts nights, family evenings, visits to local attractions and walks.

In terms of professional development, the most dynamic and active association is the Working Women’s Network of Grenoble, which organizes networking lunches, workshops and seminars, and is run by a very helpful and efficient body of women. For opportunities to do volunteer work there is VSArt, an association that brings cultural opportunities to disadvantaged and elderly people. The Grenoble chapter was set up and is run by American Meredith Charreyron.

Grenoble also has a number of amateur English-speaking theatre groups. Students of different ages from Cité Internationale Scolaire de Grenoble participate in an annual pantomime and Upstage, respectively. The latter puts on very high quality plays every year at Ste-Marie-d’en-Bas, a 166-seat theatre off Place Notre Dame. Likewise, students of the English department at Stendhal University put on productions on campus every year. English-speakers are also invited to join a new Grenoble English Theatre Group, run by Nathalie Joshua. Novices welcome. For more information contact her at nathaliejoshua@hotmail.com

For health and well-being, Anglo-style therapeutic massage and aromatherapy can be obtained from Amy Cannata (waterfallwellness@me.com) and Shiatsu massage from Rebecca Skillman.

Finally, of course, I mustn’t forget to mention your very own Grenoble Life, which has articles and practical info for English speaking residents past, present and future. It also includes photo sharing, free classified ads and interviews with prominent members of the Anglophone community.

If I have forgotten any essential clubs or organizations, please use the comments box below to add to the list.

Microphone. Photo: hiddedevries

English Talk Radio is a talk show in English on 90.8 Radio Campus Grenoble. We talk about film, theatre, finance, restaurants, travel, and have a variety of topical guests. We are four presenters: Kristine Minski talks about finance, Christina Menez talks about China, Mary Zaccai talks about student issues, and Vivian Draper – animatrice/rédactrice – hosts the show. Every Sunday at 12.30pm, and every Wednesday at 7pm on 90.8, Radio Campus Grenoble and live on www.campusgrenoble.org – and also here on Grenoble Life.

The February 24 English Talk Radio show took place at Université Stendhal with Caroline Schlenker and students of the English department acting class.  Listen to the full show: here

Classroom. Photo: sfar

Gregg West is an American history and geography teacher at Cité Scolaire Internationale. He also handles the school pantomime, organic gardening club, interpersonal communication classes and music club.  In this explosive article for Grenoble Life, he describes his career-long efforts to change the education system in France.

It would be preposterous to assume that any education system in the world does its job correctly, when one observes the amount of poverty, crime, violence, drug addiction, alienation, loneliness, pollution, general unhappiness, and other symptoms of human foolishness, frailty, or limitations.  But one could just say, “Oh well, people do their best and one can’t ask more of them than that.” Nevertheless, when one is a teacher and has to face an educational system day in and day out with its many constraints, it can be very trying, for even if he or she sees many kids succeed and go on to brilliant careers and happy, if not totally unperturbed, lives, there are a lot of others who will live troubled existences.

Over the last 37 years, I have tried to learn to teach and have perpetrated my teaching upon unsuspecting people, both children and adults, in North America, Scotland and France, but I have also had these teaching systems (pardon my syntax) perpetrated upon me. The following observations about the French system are not at all intended to exonerate other systems from similar criticism.

More is better

Since settling permanently in France in 1983 I have witnessed a system which believes that more is better despite the famous saying of Montaigne (loosely translated) that a “well-made head is better than a full head.” Indeed, in the Connexion of February 2010, the minister of Higher Education, Ms. Valerie Pécresse went so far as to say to a journalist “you seem to be contradicting yourself when you cast doubt on the level of lycée students passing the Bac but then suggest reducing the number of hours.”  Really, Ms. Pécresse, this is a national disease, thinking that more is always better. So why not give children 16-hour school days? Children need time for other things than school work to become thinking, feeling, well-balanced individuals. I thought everyone knew that … hmmm.

A second aspect of the French system that is curious for those of us from English-speaking cultures is the belief held by many that school is only for instruction of specific subject matters, does not require a global education of children in terms of understanding their social and psychological context, learning to motivate them, inciting them to improving their citizenship, social relations, and so forth and that, therefore, teachers do not need to learn anything but their own subject matter at university. No interpersonal communication, no group dynamics, no pedagogical methods, no interdisciplinary knowledge to coordinate interdisciplinary projects … It apparently threatens many whose work status and contract only commits them to knowing their subject … even if inspectors put pressure on them to teach better … and the French government has just decided to shut down IUFM (teacher training institutes), something highly consistent with this view.

In this extremely cerebral environment, a third characteristic of the French system, at least insofar as it concerns university-bound students, is that they needn’t develop artistic, manual or day-to-day skills like typing, driving a car, first aid, or cooking at school. (Well, they DO learn road security, but only the theory … ) In short, learning does NOT involve doing things, except writing essays, carrying out a few carefully limited classroom experiments, doing research and other relatively abstract tasks. So these other skills surprisingly only get developed among a minority of people who have the money to do them outside of school or have families patient and qualified enough to help them learn these things. When I see high school kids pecking away with their fingers on a keyboard, when I have to fork out over 1000€ for driving classes, or when I see the beginnings of obesity among French young people like in my native America, I do wonder about these priorities.

Lip service

Finally, as with many other school systems, the French speak of democracy, but practice dictatorship, pay lip service to cooperation and solidarity but practice competition, praise acceptance of differences, but punish those who do not “fit in” with ridicule, humiliating grades, and other forms of social exclusion, lecture people about human rights while submitting high school students to 50 hour weeks (35 hours of class plus 15 hours of homework a week), claim to be ecological while using throw-away pens, producing millions of tons of new, bleached, non-recycled fibre paper waste that are not even recycled, and brag about their great cuisine while abandoning their children to canteens that serve poor quality, poorly balanced meals that contain pesticides, instead of making quality and organic food priorities.  What is the saying, “Do as I say, not as I do?” Problem is, it doesn’t work that way and, as Leonard Cohen said, “Everybody knows…” Kids’ strongest learning experiences stem from doing and from example.

In such an unnatural neurotic environment, is it any wonder then that many French kids suffer from depression, insomnia, smoke a lot of cigarettes, become fashion victims or anorexics, drop out due to a lack of motivation (around 10%), or decide not to care about politics or association activity, plunging into a life of semi-blind consumption as adults, with no personal artistic side that they can cultivate to express themselves healthily? Is it any wonder that they become recalcitrant at suggestions that they drive less (so little physical exercise during their childhood), watch less TV (when did they learn how to entertain themselves?), vote more (when did anyone ask their opinion anyway?), or think about important issues (weren’t they only supposed to give teachers the answers required?), or question notions the media and political elite expound as evident (nuclear energy and genetically modified organisms aren’t dangerous, are they, or THEY would tell us … like our teachers … wouldn’t they?) Once you’ve got people conditioned, it is very hard to change them. Some would even suggest that this conditioning has been done CONSCIOUSLY to preserve the privileges of elite, but I’m not much of a conspiracy theory advocate, so I’ll leave this idea aside. I think it’s just force of habit and past conditioning … an unwillingness to question what came before.

Unfamiliar future

At any rate, all that I have described is what one would call a SCHEMATIC, OVERDRAWN picture of the French Educational system. Of course, there are positive sides, but you all know those; France is one of the world’s leading countries in social programs, economic productivity, democratic freedoms, and so forth … well, for the moment at least … But is this preparing us for an oil-poor, resource-poor future in a world where company relocation to Newly Industrialized Countries may force us to reorganize a great deal of our economy and learn to share, be happy with less, and use our imagination to find new, workable ways of life?

But of course changing things is never easy. People are afraid of unfamiliar ways, they think that what they know is the only way, there are vested interests, it involves calling habits and training into question, it doesn’t suffice to throw money at problems, and even good ideas, if poorly or insufficiently applied will lead to failure. In short, it isn’t a technical impossibility, but it remains a political improbability.

Political debate

I decided in 1987 to try to do something about all this. I spent five years in a minor political party which seemed highly motivated to lead change in society as the chairman of their education commission, consulting hundreds of students, parents, teachers, and others involved in education, as well as union representatives and school directors. We worked out propositions to change school radically (more on what these were later) … something in line with the party’s desire to “create a cultural majority for change.”

I sent the propositions to the hundred or so representatives of various regions in the party’s governing committee a few months before it was scheduled for debate on the agenda. But the day of the debate, there were “more urgent matters” so debate was pushed back till the very end of a Sunday afternoon when one third had already left to take their trains, leaving only 10 minutes to debate a topic that concerns every single citizen of a democratic country. Of those remaining, fully half were teachers … and a plurality of these opposed all the measures which might require them to retrain to handle new functions. So without any guidelines on HOW to change our propositions, we were sent back to the commission to “work on the propositions some more…” Thoroughly disgusted, I resigned as commission chairman.

An alternative school

In the U.S., as a young teacher, I had already experienced the difficulties of even modifying one local system of education, so I reasoned that if what I considered the most progressive political party in France and its host of teachers were unable to be open towards real change, then there was little hope of changing such a huge system from within. I worked for the next seven years on the idea of creating an alternative school, parallel to the system, in hopes that an example outside the system might show people what is possible. But here too I was to be foiled. Among the enthusiastic parents supporting this idea, most were penniless; among the enthusiastic teachers supporting this idea, most, not surprisingly, wanted to be paid! Real estate was too expensive to rent in large towns, and small towns placed obstacles in our path, fearing we might lower already precarious enrolment figures, provoking the closing of their public schools. There were also dreamers who talked about “borrowing seven million francs” from a bank as if any bank would ever entertain such an idea. A subscription among political activists raised some 135,000 francs, but we were never able to establish a three year budget that promised any hope of surviving, even on minimum incomes, so we were obliged to abandon the plan and send people’s money back.

At this point I decided to give up. I had a good job in a public school and began trying to develop extracurricular activities to compensate for the unidimensional aspects of school. I created a music club and later a theater program where kids could learn self-management, cooperation, create, express themselves, develop their confidence, teamwork and self-esteem, associate with older students and adults as role models instead of submitting to age segregation, and receive recognition without grades from those around them.  I found no need to involve parents for the music club, but broke an additional taboo when I got parents involved heavily in the theater program … something few French school teachers like to see … parents in the school working with kids … perhaps because it threatens their own prerogatives to teach as they see fit … but this was only outside of class …

In my own classes, I developed a method of teaching involving considerable debate and discussion, with occasional projects and games, but the program was often so immense that time was always pressing us to return to a teacher-centered curriculum.

Moving the mammoth

I suppose this is why when I was approached by a sympathetic political activist, I accepted getting involved in an association whose goal, like mine, was to move the mammoth (change the educational system) even though I remained very sceptical about the possible success of such an effort.

Over a period of about three years, we developed a support group of some 300 people, including thirty to forty teachers and three school headmasters, and we elaborated propositions very similar to those the education commission I’d managed had put forth only to be rejected. We outlined a plan for creating special schools, particularly in the junior high years (collège), and hopefully one or two in each department, which would function differently and thus serve as an illustration of alternative approaches to education. The basic ideas behind these schools included:

• Only four hours of academic solids per day, so less Math, less French, less language, less science, less history and geography (oh dear!!!). Interdisciplinary projects as a way of exploring basic subjects.
• Groups for enrichment, remedial work and orientation for one hour a day.
• Workshops to learn practical subjects, develop artistic abilities, and physical education 1 hour a day.
• Collective expression and action a few hours a week to put democracy into practice.
• A severe limit on homework and no grading, but still evaluating and testing.

One can like or dislike these propositions, but the fact remains that they allow schools to handle a number of the objections mentioned above and the existence of a certain number of schools of this type in the Northern part of Europe tends to confirm that they can be a positive experience, developing well-rounded, independent, thinking students … if properly applied.

We sent a 10-page summary and a longer 40-page detailed version of the project to various people in positions to make decisions. We met with those in charge of education at City Hall and the Conseil Général, as well as the man in charge of innovation at the Rectorate and the Academic Inspector of Isère. All reacted favorably, saying the idea looked great. When we said we also had a list of teachers and an administrator to run the school though, the Rectorate and Academic Inspection suddenly began hemming and hawing about the fact that they would need to talk to unions about it, that they couldn’t name people on the basis of aptitude or motivation, but only on the basis of seniority points (meaning the death of the project) and that they would have to check with their hierarchy on whether this was all possible (i.e., if it wasn’t pursued, it wouldn’t be THEIR fault …) Despite attempts to get them to put this on paper, they refused and they began doing what bureaucrats do when they don’t want something to happen. They sat on it, refusing further meetings, correspondence or any other indication of their position, killing the project.

Things I can do

So, at age 57, tired of spending so much energy for nothing, I chose to devote myself instead to things I CAN do without political games and support from people higher up. I continued with my teaching job, interpersonal communication classes, the music club with its concerts and CDs, the theater program with up to five shows and 750 spectators per year (our headmaster even had a stage built for us … and other groups in the school to use.) And I created an organic gardening club in our school.

None of this however will make the changes I believe that France (and other countries) desperately need in their education systems if they want to create a vast majority of real human beings capable of adult behaviour, wisdom, commitment, values, and coherent behaviour emancipated from the manipulative, narrow channels that current systems carve for them.

Looking For Sam, March 10-11, 2010

Caroline Schlenker instructs the acting class for students in the English department at Stendhal. She talks to Grenoble Life about staging plays with her students, teaching English through drama, and this year’s production, Looking For Sam, March 10-11.

Grenoble Life: What is your role in the Stendhal English department theatre workshop?

Caroline Schlenker: I am the instructor of this course. I teach the core acting class as part of the English Licence Degree for second year students, as an alternative class to the conversation module. I teach diction, pronunciation, basic drama techniques, and stage the students’ production each year. The workshop meets every week for two hours (but there are additional rehearsals for the play). 

GL: How often does the department put on a play?

Caroline: Last year, we exceptionally put on two plays (Once Upon A Time In A Screen/Stage Audience, a project between cinema and theatre, in partnership with the cinema le Club in Grenoble; and Macbeth, staged by third year students). This year, however, we will only put on the play Looking For Sam, although the third year students will present a short extract of their own work as a (surprise) opening to the Sam Shepard play. It is a play they have written (!) and staged. 

GL: What kinds of plays and themes do you normally tackle?

Caroline: It varies. We put on Harold Pinter sketches thanks to the chance meeting of Susan Blattes, then head of the English Department, and the actor/director Patrick Seyer at a Pinter play. Their encounter led to the idea of a joint venture on Pinter with the English Department. The project was then to work on Pinter through the specificity and rhythm of his language and the relationship between the characters that this language thus establishes. The students worked on the texts through the drama in the English class I was teaching, and shaped their characters through the staging by the professional director Mr Seyer.

This partnership was so interesting and stimulating in fact it led us to work together again on a project on cinema, Once Upon a time in a Screen/Stage audience, which I directed whilst he did the actor training (in English!). For this project, the idea of working on the different spaces of theatre and cinema was an idea I always wanted to tackle. Cinema has always fascinated me. 

The Macbeth project was an idea of the students, who asked to work on Shakespeare and studied the staging of The Winter’s Tale at the MC2 in Grenoble. This year we are working on Sam Shepard as a way to explore the sound and musicality of American English – a way for us to approach language differently, once again. Working with a musician helped me to have yet another approach to the language, and to the text!

GL: Who chooses the script?

Caroline: Setting aside the Pinter and the Macbeth projects, I choose the script!

GL: How long does it take to prepare and rehearse for one play? Tell us a little about what it involves.

Caroline: We have some basic drama classes between September and December (where we work on literary classics such as Pygmalion or the works of Oscar Wilde, or some other types of classics such as Monty Python and Rowan Atkinson’s stand up comedy drills) in order to practice pronunciation and intonation and learn some basic conversational techniques, such as how to make a point, or how to make the other person react in some way with words. We also learn voice and body integration, and we explore imagination through the English language (the only language spoken in class!).

When working on a text, we learn to think about a character’s goals, tactics, his relationship with the other characters and we write his curriculum vitae. In January, we get our texts for the final production (I write the transitions for our scenes, and our rehearsals start). Each group rehearses about four hours a week (each scene constitutes a group – there are four scenes). So I see them about 10 hours a week (two hours are with the whole class during our actual class time). We perform in March. A lot of commitment and motivation is involved in this process!

GL: Tell us more about this year’s production.

Caroline: It’s an exploration into Sam Shepard’s work. You see, Sam Shepard once told an interviewer: “I preferred a character that was constantly unidentifiable, shifting through the actor, so that the actor could play almost anything, and the audience was never expected to identify with the characters,” With his shifting vision of identity, the way in which he portrayed the characters in his plays, Shepard was giving away a bit of himself.

Our question then was: who is this Sam Shepard, and is he as a writer shying away from revealing his true self? Another component of his character that intrigued us was his love for music, and his failure to become a musician. Through the play Looking For Sam, we decided to make an imaginary investigation into how Sam Shepard wrote his plays. With the collaboration of a local songwriter/ singer Noel Belmondo, we invented the musical (and linguistic) scenery for the text. 

It is our fantasy, through the influences of rhythm and music we found in the language, of how the text came to be. We hope the audience will be driven to the special space created by an artist at work! The play includes excerpts of some of his most famous plays: True West, Curse of the Starving Class, La Turista (which is about, as its name so aptly suggests, Turista!) and Buried Child. The play is free of course and will be performed at 7.30pm on March 10^th and 11^th, 2010, at the Amphidice, the theatre in Stendhal University.

GL: Tell us about some highlights from previous years.

Caroline: All the projects and moments we shared in the drama workshop were equally wonderful thanks to the incredible involvement of the students – it’d be hard for me to pick!

GL: Tell us a little about your background and how you came to be involved with the Stendhal English department theatre workshop?

Caroline: I got hired as a Maître de Langue just as Mr Seyer got hired to work on his project – and it just happened that Ms Blattes, then head of the department, knew I had some background in acting. I accepted to take the workshop, which had been closed since the departure (retirement) of the last professor in charge of the workshop: Mr. Derioz.

GL: How effective are theatre and acting as a way to learn English?

Caroline: It is incredible. The students start off reluctant to speak English and end up speaking English to each other in the corridor – what can I add? Some no longer notice they’re switching between languages by the time we get to the final performance! Their confidence in their ability to speak is what impresses me most. They feel they are able to be actor of their world in another language. It would be too long to explain – why don’t you come to our Colloquium on the subject at the University on March 5th? It’s also at Amphidice!

GL: Tell us about your audience and some of the feedback you’ve had.

Caroline: We’ve had a large audience, ranging from acting professionals to families of the actors, fellow students, Cité Internationale teachers and students, and the English department professors (and other professors from the Drama and Languages departments!) and staff of course. Everyone is impressed with just how much the students get involved in this project, and it is so important for the students to have them there!

GL: How can we get tickets for the play?

Caroline: For any information or for reservations, please contact the service Culture de l’Université Stendhal: Tél: 04 76 82 41 05. Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday : 10 am–12 am and 2pm – 4pm/ or by email: caroline.schlenker (at) u-grenoble3.fr

p'tit vélo dans la tete on campus - photo: www.ptitvelo.net

Are you a student or a new arrival and want to know how to live in Grenoble on a budget? Expatriated Brit John Lubbock has learnt the hard way, and has kindly agreed to share his tips and experience with Grenoble Life readers.  

Grenoble is not a bad place to be poor. But, like a tramp with a favourite patch, you have to know your environment; or like a foraging bear, where the best pickings are to be had. You may need to change some of your bad, foreign influenced habits to make the most of your insertion into French culture (beer is expensive apart from Stella, which isn’t one of the best things about French gastronomy, is it?). 

Tourists, as we all know, are naive sponges who deserve to be squeezed dry, so try not to seem like one. People will often poorly attempt to converse with you in English when they realise you are not a native, but insist, “Je suis en France, il faut que je parle en français“, and they won’t despise you as much for usurping their language as the world’s Lingua Franca. It is mostly from lack of better information that tourists agree to pay higher prices, so I intend to give you some information to help you make better spending choices.

Accommodation

If you do not want to spend your first month in France on a sofa or in a hostel, it pays to research accommodation before you arrive. There is an association called OSE Club which you can join for €30 which will find apartments for you in a designated area of the city, if you want to be near to a university. Then there are websites such as www.appartager.com and www.vivastreet.com, which have petites annonces for flats, but these are generally only useful if you pay the €10 fee to see the telephone numbers of the advertisers and call them up directly as they don’t answer messages on the site.

Watch the French film L’Auberge Espagnole before you go to get an exaggerated idea of being interviewed by your future flatmates and the kinds of hilarious European stereotypes you are likely to be cohabiting with. If you are not a student, it is even more important to find a flat quickly, because without a rental agreement, you will not be able to get a French bank account or contract telephone, and will thus be considered a SDF (Sans Domicile Fixe) by the French. This will mean that you are forced to become a baba cool (hippy) and sit in the street with your dogs holding out a frying pan to ask for spare change.  

N.B. If you are staying for less than a year, it is worthwhile getting a contract phone, which will be cheaper than pay as you go, the phone will be nicer, and there’s little they can do about it when you tell them that you’re leaving the country before the contract finishes and close your bank account. But don’t tell anyone I told you.  

If you have never lived in the socialist paradise that is France, you may not be aware of the kinds of social benefits available to people living there. The CAF’s housing benefit system could pay for some of your rent if you are a student or living on a low wage, although like most bureaucratic systems in France it takes about six weeks to get anywhere with it, and since these forms are all in French, it is more like a test of your reading comprehension which you need to pass to gain entry to French society.  

Learning French

If you are (un)lucky enough to be a political refugee, asking at the Préfecture (a big administrative building which makes you feel like Josef K from Kafka’s The Trial, wondering if you’ll ever be told what you’ve done wrong in order to end up there) or at the Conseil Général can get you free French lessons, which can otherwise be obtained by calling the ADATE organisation. I am not sure if you can get lessons with them without being a refugee, but I am considering telling them that I have been forced to flee from the UK as a result of the impending government takeover by a bunch of Tories with accents so posh and annoying that they constitute a form of social oppression. If you have to go to the Préfecture for any annoying bureaucratic reason, like to obtain a carte de séjour, don’t ask anyone which ‘queue’ you should stand in. The French for queue is pronounced like ‘que’, while saying ‘queue’ sounds like the French word for something rude.  

Transport  

When it comes to transport, if you are poor, the bicycle/vélo will become like your husband or wife, or perhaps the god to whom you pray for benevolence. If it works well, you love it and praise it, and if not you curse it. There are three main places I know of to obtain bikes cheaply. Firstly: on the street. I found three bikes lying in crumpled heaps on pavements in the first month I was here. The problem then is to take them to somewhere you can repair them. So either have a bike repair kit (Decathlon, around €15), or go to the second place to get cheap bikes – Un P’tit Vélo Dans La Tete meaning something like ‘A little bit biked in the head’.

This atelier (workshop) sells bikes that have been repaired for between €15-60, or you can go there to fix your own by paying a €15 abonnement (subscription). It is a good place to practice your French, as there are lots of guys who can help you to fix your bike, and they have a handy board on the wall with a picture of a bike and the French names for every part of it indicated. However, fixing bikes takes time, and if you have a second hand bike, or one you bought at P’tit Velo, it will break down roughly every two weeks. On the plus side, you will get very good at repairing bikes. The third option is Métrovélo, who will give you a generic yellow bike for €75 for six months (plus €50 deposit) and repair it for you if it breaks down.  

Of course, you can always chance a free ride on the tram, but getting caught by the officials will land you with a €65 fine, unless you can pretend to be a totally clueless foreigner. The tram tariff is €24 a month for students, but Grenoble is the flattest city centre in France, and waiting for a tram and slumming it with Joe Public are hidden costs not worth paying in my opinion. That’s why liberté comes before egalité and fraternité: because it’s more important.  

If you want to go further that the city limits, go to www.covoiturage.fr and find someone who is making the same journey as you to go with. It will be far cheaper than any other method of transport, and the people I’ve met doing it have all been nice.  

Food  

Although many people come to France for the food, as an impoverished young person, this will likely be one of the areas in which you sacrifice quality in order to live within your means. To paraphrase Oscar Wilde, a man who lives within his means has no imagination; but you will likely be finding your culinary options limited by the exigencies of having little money to spend. Ed is a cheap supermarket, and it happens to bear the name of some of my friends, although since the name Edward doesn’t exist in French, they call it “Ee-de”, which sounds much more corporate and less friendly. It is worth taking a notebook around to the supermarkets to write down prices of items you buy regularly, because while vegetables may be cheaper in Ed, Géant may have cheaper milk, for example. Unfortunately, I have just been informed by my collocataire that Ed is closing down – evidently the world of modern commerce is too cruel for such friendly-named businesses – but Lidl is almost identical in that it has hardly any choice of products and brands you have never heard of, but they are all usually cheaper than the Géant/Casino equivalent.  

Yet if one just bought the budget Casino brand pasta/rice/couscous to eat with with vegetables every day, you might end up wanting to kill yourself. So for the minimum luxury of not cooking the food yourself, you can go to a CROUS canteen, near the gare, or in Domaine Universitaire. These are supposed to be for students, but you can just pay the €2.90 it costs for a meal there in cash without showing any student card as well. You get bread, salad or cheese, a main meal of canteen standard chips/pasta/vegetables/etc. and some meat served with customary indifference and a bad attitude by people who look deeply unhappy about serving ungrateful students who could pay their wages with their tuition fees (those who go to an École supérieure anyway).  

Working  

Of course, if you really want to make things easier on yourself financially, you could get a job. “A job? What’s that?” I hear you cry. “I am a student – they don’t work. Then I wouldn’t have time for all the drinking and Facebook which the energy I consume from crisps and Red Bulls goes into”. Well, you could work part time. If you are a native English speaker, you could get employed by a soutien scolaire company, telling kids what they did wrong with their homework. Believe me, it’s satisfying to be on the other end of this after receiving homework corrected in red-teacher-ballpoint ink for 10 or more years. Don’t be put off if you don’t have a TEFL or CELTA qualification, I didn’t find this a hindrance, though it may help to say you have experience of private teaching even if you haven’t.

If there’s one thing I learned looking for jobs here it’s that it doesn’t pay to be honest: always tell them you are available to work, always tell them you have the experience. It took me a while of offering my services to language companies (Grenoble Life already has a useful list here), universities and other places like the Chamber of Commerce and Rectorat before I was employed, but once you have your foot in the door, you will hear about other teaching  jobs that are advertised within teaching circles.  

The Pôle jeunesse on Avenue Agutte Sembat has a useful wall full of job and accommodation offers. But if you have a degree, they will tell you that they can’t help hoity-toity types like you and that you should go instead to AFIJ who have an office at 29 Avenue Felix Viallet near Cour Jean Jaurès. These guys mostly have offers for internships or well paid jobs, so if you are just looking for a petit boulot, the Pôle jeunesse might be more useful.

You could try working in a bar, but the French can be quite snooty if your linguistic skills aren’t up to scratch. This matters less when applying to one of the studenty bars like London Pub or Sun Valley, but you will invariably have to call a Frenchman ‘boss’ (and thereby lose all the nationalistic self-respect you have built up living in your own great land), and traipse around the campus putting up flyers just for the pleasure of sacrificing most of your evenings for €9 an hour. There are also lots of agencies you can work for who hire waiters and other restauration workers for company or other private functions, but I personally found them somewhat useless, though Adecco is worth a try. Then you can try the listings in Pôle Emploi, which is like the JobCentre in the UK, but with more paperwork.  

Of course one of the reasons why you came to Grenoble is to ski, so if you are a student, join the École de Glisse, and try to obtain some cheap equipment from one of the second hand ski places like Boite aux Skis. There is no way of getting around that skiing is expensive however you do it, but hopefully you will have saved enough money in other areas to afford the silly ski-pass prices. And if you injure yourself, just remember to have your European Health Card handy. Good luck, mes amis.

'my guitar'. Photo: Chewy Chua

Gregg West is an American history and geography teacher at Cité Scolaire Internationale. He also handles the school pantomime, organic gardening club, interpersonal communication classes, and music club, which he has written about here for Grenoble Life.

by Gregg West

About ten years ago, I had a student in ninth grade (3ème) who had stopped working at school. As I listened to her, I discovered a deeper cause.

“My parents have a wonderful house and a swimming pool, but they work 60 hours a week and I never see them. And school is beginning to resemble that for me. I can’t be bothered. I don’t care about these things.  I don’t want to grow up and be like that!”

“Well you don’t have to if you make different choices. You know, one can live with a lot less.  Happiness isn’t about wealth though many confuse them.  But I can see you feel discouraged.  What really interests you in life?”

“I’d love to learn to play the guitar,” she replied “’cause I love music. But the school day’s so long and I live so far away that there’s no possibility. And anyway, everybody says you can’t make a living at that.”

“Well, life isn’t just about money, is it?  You can do music on the side and still learn a profession.  What if I taught you a bit here at school when you have an hour between classes, would that interest you?”

Her face was transformed, “Oh, Mr. West! I’d love that!” So we organized a little guitar class. And this girl began studying again, her motivation back, started a rock group, and finally got her Bac and went on to university.

Soon, the rumour got around and the demand for guitar lessons became a problem because there was no place in the school where we could do this without bothering classes.

But creative, manual and self-run, co-operative enterprises are a sorely missing aspect of education in France. Children need these to round out their personalities, to develop a sense of self-esteem and responsibility, a sense of meaningful activity that they choose for a change that is not imposed, and, of course, to have fun!

So when the new International High School was created in 2001, I immediately identified a place where we could set up a club. At first I lent my own equipment and we built a drum set out of wood and plastic paint cans until concerts brought in enough money to purchase equipment: guitars, a bass, a synthesizer, amplifiers, drums, microphones, cables, and a digital studio. I encouraged all those who knew how to play to teach others and little by little the club grew. The Foyer Socio-Educatif in the Collège and the Maison des Lycéens in the High School also gave us some help buying equipment.

The club now has about 100 members, and 10 supervisors chosen from among the students involved run the club, keeping a check on how members put things away, notifying me of problems, and organizing three or four concerts a year, including one with pay entry to help finance equipment repair and purchase. There are groups that rehearse there an average of about 12 hours each week, free tutorials by experienced members to teach others to sing or play an instrument, and we have even put out two multilingual albums, one in 2006 about AIDS (Sept langues contre le SIDA) with 17 songs which sold about 160 copies and led to a 1000€ contribution by the club to an anti-AIDS association and a more recent album Etat Planète (Et Ta Planète/Et Tape-là-nette) which has sold about 70 copies so far, allowing us to finance an organic gardening club.

The club is only open to our own students for obvious reasons of security and competition for the time slots, but if others want to know how we did it, they can contact me at: gregg.west (at) ac-grenoble.fr

CSI Panto 2008-2009

Hélène Perrin-Gouron is part of the team that puts on the annual pantomime with students at Cité Scolaire Internationale (CSI). She talked to Grenoble Life about costumes, props, music and risqué double-entendre …

Grenoble Life: What is your role in the production of the pantomime at CSI and how long you have been doing it?

Hélène Perrin-Gouron: It’s my third panto with the CSI. Yet this program has existed for five or six years. I’m currently managing the rehearsals. Mandy Besson, Gregg West and I are co-ordinating the show, each one of us in charge of a specific area. We’re also helped by a crew of about 15 people on a regular basis. Then we get extra help when we get closer to the performances. I’d say that a total of around 40 people (adults and teens, though not including the actors themselves) will have worked on the panto by the time it gets on stage for the shows.

GL: For the benefit of non-British readers, what is a pantomime?

Hélène: Ha! Someone burst out laughing once when I said that I was doing a pantomime in English. Of course, the thought was that a pantomime is a mime, therefore silent. Actually, it used to be; but over the years, it turned into a ‘humorous musical’.

Pantomimes are very much a British theatrical genre, usually performed around Christmas, and almost always based on long-established children’s stories. It also has conventions: the leading female character is usually played by a man, there’s also risqué double-entendre, well-known songs with re-written lyrics, an actor in an animal costume and there are various kinds of interactions with the public. This means that we could be throwing out candies to you … [laughs]

GL: What is this year’s pantomime? When and where does it take place?

Hélène: The students of the Junior High English Section of the Cité Scolaire Internationale of Grenoble will be performing Peter Pan. The first show will be on January 20^th, 2010, in Salle polyvalente at the CSI. We’ll hold five performances there.

GL: How is the script chosen?

Hélène: The previous years, Gregg West and Mandy Besson edited existing scripts so that each individual on stage would have a moment. This year, with the help of two other adults, Mandy wrote a script from scratch! I’m dying to talk to you about my favourite moments but then, I would spoil it for you if I did!!!

GL: How are the actors chosen?

Hélène: Thanks to the quality it’s reached, the CSI panto seems to have turned into a tradition. Its success has brought more and more students to the auditions. They are cast accordingly to their strong points knowing that we need actors, dancers and/or singers. This year, we have a cast of 41 students on stage, aged from 11 to 14.

GL: For how long do rehearsals take place - there must be a lot of preparation?

Hélène: Not at all! [wink] Yes, it’s colossal work. First there is the script to find and either edit, or write, and do the blocking too. Then we have auditions in June, and in September, rehearsals start. Not only do the students have ‘regular’ rehearsals twice a week, but they also have song and dance rehearsals. (Just to give you a hint of what’s hiding behind this little group of words ‘dance rehearsal’: 17 choreographies were created this year by Isabelle Lietar.) We’ve got to get lyrics changed, find the pieces of music we need, record the soundtrack, imagine and make costumes, list and find props, compose and paint the scenery, create an ambience with lights, and finally organize the publicity and ticketing. There’s work during the shows too …

GL: Tell us a little about your background and how you became involved with the international school panto?

Hélène: I did some theater when I was in the US. And then … life! For years, I was busy with my job as a scriptwriter for film and tv. No time for theater, which I was missing. The CSI panto is always looking for passionate committed people so … I guess we were all lucky there!

GL: How do the French, or even non-British audience members, react to the panto – do they not think it’s a little unusual!?

Hélène: Pantos certainly are unusual, which may be why one gets caught up by the ambience though he/she must experience some sort of a culture shock. In fact, last year, when I was watching a Monty Python film, I suddenly realized how incredible it was that these guys were so obviously panto-raised and the world does not know about it!

GL: How can we find out more and get tickets for this year’s panto?

Hélène: Our posters and program will be ready mid-November and the ticketing will start right away. We’ll have a show at 2.30pm on Wednesday, January 20^th. On the 21^st and the 22^nd, shows will be at 7.30pm. And on Saturday, January 23^rd, we’ll have a show at 10am and a show at 7.30pm. Tickets are six euros for adults, from age 4–18 tickets are three euros and children under four come in for free. Most performances sold out last year so we highly recommend that you make reservations at gregg.west (at) ac-grenoble.fr, starting now!

Parents and their Toddler Talkers enjoying a story. Helen McEwan is second from left

abc anglais is a brand new English speaking playgroup in Grenoble for the youngest of children and their parents no matter where you are from. Mums, dads, toddlers and babies are totally immersed in an English-speaking environment during the session, joining in the nursery rhymes and songs, listening to favourite stories, playing age-appropriate games as well as taking part in art and craft activities all conducted in English. It’s run by me, Helen McEwan, a UK qualified Speech and Language Therapist and experienced English language teacher.

Every session is structured around a subject, which forms part of a five week theme, for example, ‘On the Farm’. We always have at least one story, one song, one nursery rhyme per subject, e.g., ‘cows’, and plenty of games and craft activities to keep the children actively interested. There is also a story and a couple of songs on the general theme which we come back to every time to reinforce the learning of the theme and to allow the children (and parents) to familiarise themselves with the English songs and stories.

There are currently three levels – “Baby Babblers” for babies up to 12 months old, “Toddler Talkers” for one to two year olds, and “Chatterbox Children” for two to three year olds.

My idea of exposing very young children to a language they do not normally speak at home is based on the theories of language development in general. There are still many mysteries surrounding language acquisition (and even more so around the thorny issue of bilingualism), but it is believed that a child learns the fundamentals of his/her own language by age three. So, in order to maximise the chances of a child learning an additional language as naturally and easily as possible, it is best to start early.

In addition, there is clear evidence that learning the sounds of language is done in the first year of life, much research quoting just the first six months as the time limit on acquiring the speech sounds specific to your language. So, if you noticed your baby being able to trill or click and make sounds more akin to more ‘exotic’ languages in its early months, this is because your baby was born with the ability to make all speech sounds, but quickly hones into the sounds s/he hears in her environment and continues to practise only those in the babble phase, around six–nine months. Therefore, if you want to pronounce another language well – especially if it sounds very different to your own, (French vs. English!), ideally you need to be exposed to the sounds of that language in the first six months of life, or certainly no later than the first year in order to reproduce them accurately later on!

Making spider bracelets with Chatterbox Children at Halloween

For this reason, I choose stories which use repetition, rhyme, have a strong rhythm, are not very ‘wordy’, but have captivating story lines as well as bold, striking artwork to capture the child’s imagination, even if s/he doesn’t know any English yet. For any form of learning, familiarisation of the subject matter is essential. Repetition is therefore a valuable learning tool, and so we come back to the stories and songs and rhymes during one session, during a theme, and also during the course of the year, but from different angles. ‘Noah’s Ark’ can be used in a session on rain, as well as animals, boats, or counting for example.  In any case, children love returning to their favourite books, toys, programmes over and over again.

The same principle applies to the songs we sing. They are carefully chosen for their ease of learning, and because they are fun, and tuneful and worth singing. Learning through song is almost primeval. Often it is easier to learn a phrase with music or with a strong rhythm – do you remember doing this when revising for an exam, or learning a new language? – as you are allowing your brain more chances of storing the data and hence more opportunities of retrieving it via various routes – the linguistic and the musical. Singing is an almost instinctive response to childcare. Many cultures use music for child rearing, and children respond instinctively to the human voice, particularly their mother’s. In this way singing constitutes a fundamental form of early interaction between parent and child.

I set up abc anglais because of my own experience of coming to Grenoble six months pregnant with my first child. Although I have worked with children, including newborns and premature babies, I had no idea what to expect with my own baby, particularly in a very new and foreign environment. And I was very disappointed to discover that actually there is very little available for parents and babies in particular. It was a very isolating and disorientating experience. Thank goodness for Open House and the Baby and Toddler Groups there, which I quickly became involved with (and I encourage all similar families to). Running the groups there and doing prototype abc sessions at my daughter’s garderie gave me the idea to combine my professional skills with offering something that I feel is lacking in Grenoble – a service for our youngest of citizens. In the UK, I worked in nurseries and clinics for the under fives, and ran parent-child interaction groups which encourage positive communication. I draw on this experience and other principles of my profession in designing and running the abc sessions.

Helen McEwan

So, abc anglais is as much an opportunity for parents to have some quality play time with their young children, as it is an opportunity for the children to become exposed to English at the optimum time for language learning. It is also an opportunity for parents to practise their English, and enjoy being in an English-speaking environment. abc anglais is as much for parents as for children, and this is a fundamental basic principle. And it’s open to everyone, not just Anglophones. Families from USA, Asia, as well as many different European countries, and French families are currently attending.

Sessions are held in two locations in Grenoble – at Les Petits Bilingues, place de Metz, on Mondays and Tuesdays, and at the new English café – Bookworm, rue St. Laurent, on Wednesday and Saturday mornings. The new block starts the week of 9 November. It will run for five weeks, with a special Christmas session in the week of 14 December. Come and join us, it’s lots of fun!

(Check out the Bookworm Café blog and the fantastic Mômes à Grenoble blog for further information on forthcoming events, or contact me: abc.anglais (at) free.fr)

Bikes, St Laurent. Photo: James Dalrymple

New resident Shonah Kennedy – aka Miss Shonah – gets around Grenoble en vélo. She encourages you to do the same. Here is her guide to enjoying and surviving your daily bicycle commute in the Capital of the Alps.

by Shonah Kennedy

Did you know Grenoble is the flattest city in France? This is a statement that I have heard on more than one occasion in my two short months here – and it has indeed been verified by my favourite search engine! What does this fact mean for the residents of Grenoble and its surrounds – Get on your bike(s)!

What better way to commute in the flattest city in France than from the luxury of your own two-wheeler, two-leg-powered machine and – as an added bonus – breathing in the fresh air of the mountainous surrounds?  So, you want to commute by bicycle … there are a few essentials before you peddle off.

Essential 1: A Bike

You can go to the usual suspects – Decathlon, Go Sport etc. or you could try viable alternatives.  Quite by mistake I bought my bike from Carrefour – not even being aware that you could get bikes – and bikes of decent quality with any service – there.  However, my vélo de ville is strong, road-ready, equipped with a cute basket and warrantee to boot! There was even a very helpful bike technician there to tighten a few nuts and bolts before I rolled it through the cash register!

If you wanted to try to commute en velo, but without committing to a bike immediately – Métrovélo can help.  They are very informative and give assistance readily (they also have insider information on where is best to buy second hand bikes, if this is something you want to consider) and you can hire a bike from them for one day or one year!

Essential 2: Protection

So, now you have your machine of choice – be sure to be well equipped! When you drive, or catch a bus or tram to commute – you can run directly from your warm and cosy house into a warm and cosy vehicle (or, of course in the summer months, air-conditioned bliss). There is a layer of vehicle between you and the sometimes inclement mountain weather. Sadly, a bike does not offer this protection so you need to B.Y.O.

Therefore (and from experience of not donning these items) gloves, jacket, head gear and very thick socks will make your commute a more enjoyable experience.  And really, need more be said – it is cold out there (now) and all extremities are vulnerable. It is always better to be able to take layers off than be so cold you can’t operate your machine properly!

With regards to a helmet – there is no question, get one!  It is the only item that will stop you from hitting your head on anything harder than your head in the case of any type of accident. When sitting parallel to a big monster truck, or bus, human insignificance seems to be magnified and these moments make you realise that helmets are good ideas!

Thanks to daylight savings and another Northern Hemisphere winter quickly approaching, it is getting very dark “out there” very early – BE VISIBLE! Yes, look like the “stop/go person” at road works, get more lights than are necessary. Imagine a rolling Christmas tree and this should give you some indication of the level of illumination you need on the roads after dark – or pre-light depending on the hour you need to start commuting.

Essential 3: Know where you are going

There are over 280 kilometres of bike paths in Grenoble.  Not only does this make commuting extremely easy to do, it also allows for many opportunities to get lost! From the Tourist office, Métrovélo, or many online sites you can get a simple map and pre-plan your daily commute, until it becomes as easy and as simple as jumping on the bus.

Now you have your essentials – get on your bike! This is an exciting moment, so considering the following will make it really fun!

Enjoy your daily commute!

**Leave yourself plenty of time to get all your gear on (layers take time to put on and take off!).  Cycle at a steady pace (you don’t want to get to work everyday looking akin to “Mr Messy” because you had to cycle like crazy to get there on time!). For timing purposes I once tried to chase a bus. This little riding experiment resulted in the conclusion that it takes approximately the same amount of time to ride a bike as it does to take the bus. So, to be safe – as I was really pushing the leg power to its limits – perhaps a little extra time should be factored in!

**The road can be a veritable mine-field. There are cars, trucks and buses coming from all directions.  Once you are in town there are trams and pedestrian traffic to contend with. Wherever there is a bike path there are traffic lights, pedestrian crossings, one way streets, Give Way and Stop signs, puddles that cars will always run into just at the precise moment as to splash onto your newly ironed trousers – so all I can say is take it easy. Don’t get bike rage. Take a breather on the footpath and be aware that you and your bike are probably the most insignificant things using the road. The wonderful thing about commuting by bike is that you can go at exactly the speed you want. You want to stop and take a photo – there is no ringing the little green button, just put on the brakes!

**Know your limits.  The other day – in the pouring rain – I saw one brave soul riding along with her umbrella open. This is an absolute personal choice – however when it is a torrential downpour I am on any form of public transport that keeps me dry!

Remember – if it is difficult and you feel out of breath and the cars are just plain ignoring you and all the lights seem to be red – you are doing a wonderful thing for your own well-being, getting to see the city in a whole new light and also you are being very kind to the precious environment! So what are you waiting for – Get on your bike(s)!

Les Caves de la Chartreuse, Voiron

Gill Baconnier has lived in France for over twenty years – seven of them in Grenoble. She teaches English, works with dyslexic children and, in her spare time, tries very hard to actually finish writing her children’s novel. A former feature writer for an English regional magazine, her articles about life in France can now be found at her blog French Windows. She kindly agreed to share this article about Chartreuse with Grenoble Life.

“They say Christianity is in decay; but no religion that invented green Chartreuse can ever die”  Saki

by Gill Baconnier

Grenoble lies in a hollow encircled by three mountain ranges: the Belledonne, famous for its ski slopes; the Vercors, a stronghold for the Résistance during World War II – and the Chartreuse, home to the Carthusian monks and their famous green liqueur. Now, I’m not a great skier and I wasn’t around during World War II but I do know a bit about the liqueur: it has a beautiful colour; it smells and tastes like a summer’s evening in an Alpine meadow and … it gives you a Day-Glo hangover that you’re not expecting because it is really strong.

A bottle of Chartreuse

The Order of the Grande Chartreuse was founded in 1084 by a German writer and academic, Bruno, who taught at the University of Rheims. Weary of the endless piles of marking, pointless administration and mind-numbingly boring staff meetings – or perhaps simply obeying a call from God – Bruno decided to become a monk. Together with six friends, he scoured France for a suitable isolated spot and happened on the Chartreuse Desert, an inhospitable snowbound place near Grenoble. The group built themselves seven simple wooden cells, a chapel and a dining hall and enjoyed a life of prayerful contemplation and light snacks, thus establishing the first Carthusian (Charterhouse) monastery. Today there are twenty-four of these communities around the world and their way of life has not changed for over nine hundred years.

In 1605, the monks at a Carthusian monastery outside Paris were given an ancient manuscript of unknown origin, entitled An Elixir of Long Life. At that time, few people knew how to use herbs and plants for medicinal purposes and the monks were only able to understand and use parts of the recipe. By 1737, the manuscript had found its way to the Grande Chartreuse near Grenoble where the monastery’s apothecary managed to unravel the complex formula and create the Herbal Elixir de la Grande Chartreuse from the maceration and distillation in alcohol of one hundred and thirty plants, flowers and various other bits of vegetation.

This new medicine was distributed locally, by mule, to Grenoble and the surrounding villages. It became surprisingly popular and the monks soon caught on to the old ‘for medicinal purposes’ routine and adapted the recipe to make a milder drink – that is to say, ninety-six rather than one hundred and twenty-four proof – which they called Chartreuse verte, Elixir de Santé.

During the French Revolution, members of all religious orders were driven out of the country. The Carthusian monks fled in 1793 and as a precaution, made a copy of their precious manuscript. One monk was allowed to stay in the monastery and he was given this copy to look after while the original was given to another monk. Unfortunately, the latter was arrested and thrown into prison in Bordeaux but was able to pass the manuscript to a mysterious hero who somehow smuggled it back to the Chartreuse, where he gave it to a monk who was in hiding near the monastery.

This monk didn’t have a clue what to do with the manuscript – and who could blame him? He had his own problems to deal with (imminent death by guillotine, hypothermia, starvation and so forth), and he promptly sold it to a local chemist, Monsieur Liotard – who didn’t have a clue either, so why he bought it in the first place is anybody’s guess.

The Chartreuse massif

In 1810, Napoleon ordered all secret recipes of medicines to be sent to the Ministry of the Interior, and a relieved Monsieur Liotard dutifully sent in his white elephant of a manuscript. Despite being experts in irrelevant waffle, nobody in the Ministry could decipher the thing, but rather than admit that, they sent it back marked REFUSED. When Monsieur Liotard died, his heirs returned the manuscript to the monastery with, one imagines, a puzzled shrug.

The monks were thrown out of France once more in 1903 under a law that prohibited all religious orders. They were allowed back in 1932, when they began producing their liqueur again. In 1935, their distillery in Fourvoirie was destroyed by a landslide and a new one was built in Voiron, which is where Chartreuse is produced today. The blending of the plants, however, is done in the monastery by two monks – the only two people in the world to be in possession of the formula. Each monk knows half the recipe and because they don’t talk to anybody – not even to each other – it remains a secret. They are linked to the distillery by computer and are therefore able to oversee production while keeping their vows of solitude and silence and doing a bit of online shopping at the same time. Green and yellow Chartreuse – the yellow is sweeter and not as strong as the green – is matured in oaken casks in the longest liqueur cellar in the world.

The original elixir is still used for medicinal purposes today but frankly, you’d have to be pretty ill not to notice the taste. I’m not sure what it’s supposed to cure – although farmers here do swear by it for the treatment of flatulence in cows (note to tourists: do not be alarmed at the sight of staggering cows. They are not suffering from bovine spongiform encephalopathy – it’s Happy Hour on the Prairie). Green Chartreuse, however, is one of my favourite drinks; it is so sweet and fragrant that I hardly notice how potent it is – but the fact that Saint Bruno is traditionally depicted nursing a skull (even if it isn’t his own) should have alerted me. Hmm … If you ask me, these monks have a lot to answer for!

Possibly flatulent Chartreuse cows

You can visit the Chartreuse Cellars in Voiron (less than half an hour from Grenoble by car but if you’re driving, you’d be wise to skip the Chartreuse-tasting part of the guided tour!):

Les Caves de la Chartreuse
10, boulevard Edgar Kofler
38500 Voiron
Tel : 04 76 05 81 77

There is also a museum, housed in 12^th century building that was once part of the monastery, at St Pierre de Chartreuse (half-an-hour’s drive from Grenoble):

Musée de la Grande Chartreuse
“La Correrie”
38380 St Pierre de Chartreuse
Tel : 04 76 88 60 45

Xavier Darcos announces plans to combat stress in the workplace. Photo: Ministère: Travail, Solidarité, Ville

James Dalrymple of Grenoble Life asks why the French – despite sleeping more and living longer than everyone else – are so stressed. Apparently the French government wants to know too …

This month Labour Minister Xavier Darcos confirmed what I had already suspected – France needs to start dealing with stress, which has reached epidemic proportions. The proposed measures may be viewed by some as a knee-jerk reaction to the media storm surrounding the apparently high number of suicides at France Telecom since 2008, which – when taking into account the size of the organisation – may not be much higher than the (admittedly relatively high) national average. However, the new regulations likely to be implemented may not solve deeper issues related to national character: having lived in France for a few years now I feel qualified to say that, contrary to popular belief internationally, stress is endemic to the nation.

Ignore the latest OECD survey that says the French spend more time eating and sleeping than anyone else, a posteriori the French are an anxious lot. As a teacher I have come into contact with a broad cross section of Grenoble’s business community and I am constantly surprised by the amount of furrowed brows and hand-wringing I encounter, and this is not just because of a lack of love for learning English.

Despite the abundance of reasons to be happy in comparison to, say, British people (having quality healthcare, for example, or efficient public transport, good weather, a proliferation of delicious fresh produce, living two years longer on average, being paradoxically slim, etc. etc.) – the French strike me as a far more stressed people.

Call it what the British would refer to as the Blitz spirit (i.e., putting on a brave phizog in the face of abject misery) but we seem to deal with life’s inconveniences better than the French. Maybe our self-depreciating nature would simply not function in a society like France’s where, on the whole, there is much less to justifiably gripe about.

But tell that to the French. I realise now why the French hold that generous stereotype of the Brits as monocle-wearing stoics, bastions of calm in the midst of chaos. It was a view of the Brits that I found laughably alien when I arrived in France as a bruised and bewildered London commuter, but now I see why.

While a Londoner can somehow find it in himself to tolerate entire weekends (and bank holiday periods) of engineering work shutdown on the Underground and dreaded Thameslink, or the limbo of an NHS waiting list, or finding that every shop he knew from his childhood has turned into a Tesco-metro-mini-express … he can probably laugh it off down at the pub.

He may even indulge in that national sport, binge-drinking, but take refuge in regaling his colleagues about the quality of his hangover the next morning. According to recent press, the Frenchman will drink 10% more than his British counterpart, but by stealth – his habit of quaffing half a bottle with every meal perhaps slowly spiralling out of control.

Contrary to conventional wisdom, the French work very hard. Yes, they enjoy unrivalled amounts of extra holiday time, but the only way to deliver France’s much-vaunted productivity is to slog it out at the desk. The French believe this too, they justify their stress by pointing out that they work harder than everybody else, something that might amuse American readers.

But no matter how much holiday is around the corner there is no doubt that the French feel the pressure in their highly regulated job market. Maybe it’s the coffee here – it makes people jumpy and brisk where the British workplace ceremony of making and drinking tea is a big cuddly arm of comfort around the shoulders: there there!

I was surprised to learn that the French sleep more than the international average, since the quality of my own sleep has declined since my arrival; it must be that coffee again. How to cure this? Making sport (sic) is the advice given by most Grenoblois as a cure-all for stress: whether it be slogging it up a 45 degree slope on a bike plastered in lycra or, even less logically, a gym, where the promise of more skin-tight neon and casual nakedness is hardly an attractive prospect to sooth my nerves.

The latter strikes me as particularly pointless in a city where – even if you don’t fancy tackling a near vertical ascent by bike dressed as an extra from Fame – plentiful cycle tracks make it the easiest of cities to work up even the most modest of sweats (my favourite kind!).

On a darker note, the relatively high suicide rate in the country may be representative of a more inherent inability of the French to cope with stress. In France Telcom’s case this has been blamed, by unions at least, on a never-ending drive for efficiency since its 1993 privatisation. The 40,000 jobs that have been lost in transforming France Telecom from public sector flagship to competitive multinational company are certainly not to be sniffed at, but I can’t help but wonder if this constant evolution - more characteristic of the American way of doing business – is a sometimes fatal anathema to a people for whom stability, security and prudence are cherished. How other nationals would react in similar circumstances is a moot point.

However, I find insistence by students of mine – who work at a recently internationalised French company - that in France one person does the job of three people in another country, as laughable. When French workers speak with misty-eyed nostalgia about the not-so-long-ago when they were less blighted by pressure, it is clear they are talking about a pre-globalised world. Is globalisation – France’s modern-era bogeyman – to blame for all this stress?

From a personal point of view, I suppose what I really want to know is: why is everybody in such a hurry? If I’m not being hassled off the road by drivers (often female I might add) for whom driving at the speed limit – or, in most cases, just acceptably above – is not fast enough, I am being harried in shop queues. The French are not quite the monster queue-pushers some Brits – sensitive in this matter - would like to suggest: it’s not quite like (and I’m talking from personal experience here) in India or Morocco, where queues are just for tourists, or in Italy (so the rumour has it), for fools.

Nevertheless, the French don’t like queues, and many try to expedite them, quite unsuccessfully, by standing as close as possible to the person in front of them. Most confoundingly, there are the women d’une certain age at my local primeur who have solved the age-old indignity of being next-in-line by placing their pannier by the cash-till before a desperate (and evidently stressful) snatch and grab job around the shop to fill it up - their place at the head of the queue secured.

I am often tempted to assuage the anxiety of those around me by saying hey, don’t stress: it’s France! when I realise how meaningless this would be. But again, what is there to be stressed about? In Britain, we have surely one of the most hysterical televisual news formats in the world, dramatised by the strokes of Big Ben: BONG! Feral youth on the rampage … BONG!! Knife crime escalation blamed on diet of Fanta and Turkey Twizzlers … BONG!!! Nuclear apocalypse beacons … etc.

How we manage to take this constant diet of failure and self-flagellation in the UK is a mystery, whereas in France the news is suspiciously neutral: 500 cars were set on fire in Paris last night but this is not representative of a wider malaise in French society and you needn’t worry your pretty little head about it.

My conclusion: maybe in Britain we are always being told that life is much worse than it really is and therefore are pleasantly surprised when we can laugh it off. In France, government promises (disseminated almost unchallenged by the television news) that the social state can cure all, can create a gap between the ideal and the reality. Anxiety may lie in between. Careful, it might be contagious!

A montage of Upstage publicity

David Simpson is producer and director of Upstage, an English Theatre Group comprising students at Cité Internationale Europole in Grenoble. Now in its 18th year, this annual play has established a tradition of outstanding comedy that draws a diverse audience from the local community. James Dalrymple met him over a pint or two – as British expats are often found doing – at O’Callaghan’s Irish Pub, to discover more about the history of Upstage and plans for next year’s production.

When I met him David had just completed successful first rehearsals for Upstage 2010. Students from the International Lycée have assumed roles both theatrical and technical after an audition process overseen by David and former student participants. Under David’s supervision this team will “take over and run all the operations, front of house, backstage, sound and light control room,” during a five night run that normally takes place between February and April.

Upstage has a long standing relationship with Ste-Marie-d’en-Bas, a 166-seat theatre off Place Notre Dame that he describes as,

… a first class theatre for audience and actors alike, in terms of size, intimacy, atmosphere, acoustics and so on. They’re much solicited, like all theatres and venues around town. But we are perceived as part of the family, and they make sure there is a place for us in their programme. Les Anglais bring a breath of fresh air and youthful vitality and joie de vivre. The Director, Diden Berramdane, is extremely supportive, and generous in help and advice. He has a very special input in terms of setting up lighting effects. We’ve built up an understanding and strong working relationship over the last 15 years, based on mutual respect. According to Diden, ‘Ils n’ont rien à envier aux professionnels’.

While rehearsals are conducted within the school, during its run the students assume almost total control of a real playhouse with an audience mix of Anglophones and local people (French translations of the script are made available in advance). Upstage is therefore not only a theatrical experience for these young people, but one in which they learn team-building and project management skills invaluable in later life. The Upstage motto, David tells me, is “strong traditions to follow, new precedents to set.”

Although Upstage productions, since its inception in 1993, could be roughly described as comedies, David – who chooses the play, before running it by a reading committee comprising colleagues at Cité Internationale (where he is head of English) – does not shy away of challenging, darker themes. Plays have included Giles Croft’s adaptation of the Ealing comedy The Ladykillers, Timberlake Wertenbaker’s Our Country’s Good and Arsenic and Old Lace by Joseph Kesselring. David aims to select ensemble pieces, in order to include as many students as possible, and works that feature a fair balance of male and female roles. Previous productions have, however, had male roles played by female students and vice versa, and in the case of plays such as Caryl Churchill’s ’Top Girls’, where the cast was dominated by female characters, more room was made for the boys in a technical capacity.

Nor does Upstage shy away from challenging technical feats, David emphasises. “There were plays I put aside, as too difficult technically, but that I found myself coming back to, as I really wanted to do them. And that’s what theatre is about in many respects. Finding solutions, and ways to do things.” Such challenges have included the depiction of:

… rowing boats up rivers; throwing bodies off bridges in the path of oncoming steam locomotives; getting the 9th Century female Pope Joan to vomit into a vase at the front of the stage; having for a set an English country house on two  floors - with staircase, gallery and nine doors/ windows, and which required rotating 180 degrees at each of the two intervals; rooftop fights, parrot escapes, a murder in a bathtub, firework displays and so on; a play that takes place, apart from the first five minutes, in the dark … when you’ve managed to meet that kind of requirement, you really do think you can cope with anything. Two years ago I seriously considered a play that needed a hot air ballon!

David is proud to announce that next year’s production will be a double-bill. The main feature will be Joe Orton’s Loot (1966), which David describes – with a glint in his eye – as a “ferocious satire about sex, death, money and the Catholic church”, lest anyone doubt that Upstage tackles more demanding material. As Loot is a relatively short piece, it will be preceded by Harold Pinter’s aptly-titled (for Grenoble) one-act play Mountain Language. The late Pinter is not, of course, known for the kind of themes typically performed by schoolchildren, and David is keen to emphasise that Upstage is a professional quality English theatre group that aims to engage adults and young people alike.
Of next year’s programme, David says:

… Loot was one of those plays I wanted to do, but put aside, as there are only five real roles in it. I need to involve a team of 10 to 12 actors. I’d also thought of doing a Pinter double bill a couple of years ago. He’s just so good. But I put that idea aside as Diden Berramdane was putting on a Pinter, The Caretaker, and which he wanted me to act in. I didn’t want to compete with him. It turns out, I found, that Loot is not too long, and I realised I could do a short play with it, and involve more actors: two teams in fact, alternating the roles they play each evening. The first rehearsal was excellent.

They are both very powerful plays, in their different ways, and can be seen by some (indeed were) as provocative. But a few years ago I was telling some ex-Upstage people about what my options were, and how I thought I would do a safe Neil Simon comedy, rather than the play that really interested me: based on history, about the first convicts sent to Australia putting on a play, against extraordinary odds. One of the convict actresses, for example, who couldn’t read for one thing, was due to be hanged before the performance, for stealing food. So the young people told me  how proud they had been to take part in plays, difficult and demanding,  which had aroused very strong reactions. They convinced me to do the Australian play. It was a huge success.

With tickets normally available at the University, Carrefour and Maison du Tourism, expect publicity – also handled by the students – to begin in earnest in the New Year. Watch this space!

Marianne Raynaud

Marianne Raynaud worked for twenty-four years at Grenoble Institute of Technology
(INPG). She has conducted TESOL workshops in France (Paris), Spain (Madrid and Seville) and the USA (Seattle). Now, she is offering workshops here in Grenoble. Grenoble Life wanted to know more.

When I was close to retirement, my young colleagues kept saying, “Marianne, you must find a way to tell other teachers about our course.” While working with me they had seen how fast our students progressed. Moreover, we received numerous letters and e-mails from former students thanking us for teaching them how to give presentations, introduce speakers, debate on topical issues, and of course be successful in job interviews where competence in English is required. They often reported on the high scores they had obtained at international exams: TOEIC, TOEFL, and Cambridge.

The year was 2003, and we were experimenting with new tools offered by the computer and Internet revolution. We were already correcting student work through email and communicating with students via our school’s intranet. So that is when I had the idea of taking the two-year CPPG (the first cycle of engineering studies) English course and putting all the material we had developed ourselves onto a DVD. This new data format enabled me to combine text, image, PowerPoint, audio and video and to make use of hyperlinks to connect explanations about techniques and exercises directly with the files we used. I also intended to make good use of the work our students produced: essays, CVs, letters, stories, TV ads and even 10 min films they wrote, directed and produced themselves. In all there are over 1,500 different files on the DVD (2.2 Go).

Now this digital book is available on my website QualityTime-ESL.com and is being used by teachers on four continents and even in China. I often communicate with these teachers and continue to write materials according to needs that are articulated. One example is the series of podcasts I have produced called Better Speaking Skills (found on iTunes). The first two are available free of charge on my website. Just look for QualityTime-ESL Podcasts (oral interactive drills) and Your English (oral vocabulary-building exercises).

Bringing teachers together to work towards a common goal is my next mission. I believe teamwork is so essential and beneficial. I am now starting a series of practical workshops in the Alps. I hope teachers will join me – and the speakers I invite – for some lively and productive collaboration. The aim is: making the life of an ESL/EFL teacher easier and more enjoyable – with great progress for our students:

Thursday, October 15th, 2009, 2 pm to 5 pm
“Student Presentations—Making Them Beneficial and Worthwhile for Everyone!” with Marianne Raynaud, Coordinator, TESOL France, Grenoble
Room B10, ENSE3 – CPPG, 961, Rue de la Houille Blanche BP 46 – 38402 Saint Martin d’Hères
Free even for non-members this year
To register or if you have any questions, write to me through my website

Thursday, October 29th, 2009 2 pm to 5 pm
(We realize it is during the holiday week, but this is our unique opportunity to work with an outstanding colleague from Paris)
Swapshop: “Using Film and Song in the Classroom“ with Sophie Pietrucci
216 rue Victor Hugo, 38920 Crolles
Free even for non-members this year
To register or if you have any questions, write to me through my website

I am also willing to organize workshops at different lycées or universities. This is an opportunity for you to have an event with colleagues at your own place of work.

There will be future workshops on:
- preparing customized booklets (workbooks),
- increasing individual student speaking time
- evaluation (written work, oral skills and participation)

And here is the program for the TESOL France Colloquium on Nov. 6th and 7th in Paris – with well-known speakers from many different countries.

Marianne Raynaud worked for twenty-four years at Grenoble Institute of Technology
(INPG), setting up English programs at ENSERG (today part of Phelma), EFPG and CPPG. She recently published QualityTime-ESL: The Digital Resource Book and runs the website QualityTime-ESL.com. She has conducted TESOL workshops in France (Paris), Spain (Madrid and Seville) and the USA (Seattle).

Gill Baconnier has lived in France for over twenty years – seven of them in Grenoble. She teaches English, works with dyslexic children and, in her spare time, tries very hard to actually finish writing her children’s novel. A former feature writer for an English regional magazine, her articles about life in France can now be found at her blog French Windows. She kindly agreed to share this article about la noix de Grenoble with Grenoble Life.

Nuts about Grenoble

by Gill Baconnier

Walnuts have been around in France for a long time … a fossilised nut dating from the Tertiary era has been discovered in Ardèche and fragments dating from the Neolithic period have been found in the lake dwellings of Charavines in Isère. The image of Stone Age man cracking nuts around the fire is comfortingly familiar, even without the paper hat and the cheap sherry…

The walnut was sacred to the Ancient Romans. They thought it looked like the human brain – the outer husk was the scalp, the shell represented the skull and the crinkly nut inside, the two hemispheres of the brain (this is interesting because my own brain, judging by its performance these days, probably looks and functions exactly like a walnut.) It was the Romans who brought walnut trees to France, after having successfully cultivated them on the slopes of Mount Vesuvius. They established plantations in the Narbonne area, in Perigord and here in the Dauphiné where they thrived.

During the Middle Ages, the walnut was used to pay rent and for a little farmhouse in the Dauphiné region you would have had to shell out a few sétiers (just over a pint) of walnuts. They were so important in mediaeval life that a new profession was created, that of ‘walnut measurer’, although it was a limited career choice as only two posts existed for the whole of France.

However, up until the nineteenth century, the Dauphiné peasants’ main income came from silk worm farms and vineyards. It was not until disease killed off the silk worms in 1858 and grape phylloxera wiped out the vines in 1870, that they turned to walnut cultivation. It was a wise choice. Walnut orchards demanded far less work than vineyards and the new Grenoble to Valence railway line made export easy. Certain species of trees were more prolific than others and legend has it that one in particular was brought here by a young demoiselle as part of her dowry, for her marriage to a local lord. These trees were nurtured and protected so that today, Grenoble produces the finest walnuts in the world. Over fifty percent of the total French production comes from this region while France itself is the third biggest exporter behind The United States and China.

In 1938, the Grenoble walnut was awarded an Appellation d’Origine Contrôlée and – just like fine wine – it meant that the quality was strictly controlled. To qualify, the walnut must be one of three varieties: the franquette, the mayette or the parisienne. These are only three of many. All walnuts look the same to me but to those in the know, each variety has its peculiarities: they are elongated or round, pale or deeply coloured, bland, sweet or bitter. Their names are sometimes bizarre and – like roses – they are often named after events or people: Oswald, Lent or Conference Souvenir; Big John, Fat John or Distaff.

Harvesting is mostly done by a harvester these days but in some places – particularly on the mountain slopes – it is still done by hand. Back at the farm, the nuts are sorted, washed and dried then packed up and sent all over the world. Technology has replaced the veillées of old where the whole village would get together in the evenings to shell walnuts and tell each other stories by the fireside, sing songs, play games and eat together. Now computers bleep, machines whirr and business booms while the ancient nut presses and dryers are quaint ruins left to crumble quietly in the shadow of the Vercors.

Both the tree and its fruit have many uses. The nut is a fertility symbol and in parts of France walnuts are mixed with onion soup and served to newlyweds or they are thrown at them instead of rice – presumably shelled beforehand. Biting on a green walnut is said to relieve toothache and a poultice of crushed walnuts and pork fat cures boils. Walnut oil was once used in lamps or as axle grease, which is hard to believe when you see the price of a tiny bottle of the stuff today. The husk was used to dye hair and clothes and stain furniture and was even used as a self-tanning lotion as recently as the 1950s.

The tree itself was considered cursed: people believed that witches held their meetings in its shade and so they would rip off its branches and throw stones at it as punishment. French folklore warns against falling asleep beneath a walnut tree for fear of waking up with a fever or pneumonia – or perhaps, quite simply, a face full of walnuts.

The wood is of superior quality – it doesn’t split, it is fine-grained and easy to sculpt and polish. It is highly resistant but also beautiful to look at. Unfortunately, it fell victim to these very qualities during the First World War, when all the trees were cut down to provide wood for rifle butts. New trees were planted when the war was over so one catastrophe at least was averted – although not the most important one.

The walnut is omnipresent in Grenoble. Eat it as it is or candied; in the form of sweets, nougat or jam, or made into wonderful tarts and cakes. Savour walnut bread or walnut-covered cheese with a salad tossed in walnut oil. As an aperitif, drink eau de Noix or ratafia, both made from walnuts. I cannot think of a better way to find out if la noix de Grenoble is really all it’s cracked up to be …

Visit a walnut museum at:

Le Grand Séchoir
Maison du Pays de la noix
705, route de Grenoble
38470 Vinay
Tel : 04 76 36 36 10

Elizabeth Stone Matho

Elizabeth Stone Matho is an American psychotherapist and art therapist, psychoanalytically trained, with a private practice in Grenoble. She has written on the use of art and creativity as therapy for children and sufferers of medical illness and trauma. Grenoble Life wanted to learn more …

Grenoble Life: You have had a private practice in Grenoble since 2003. Was it difficult to establish yourself professionally in France having started your career in the US?

Elizabeth Stone Matho: Yes, what was difficult for me was that I was unknown professionally here, since my psychotherapy training was in the US, so I began my practice without a professional réseau. That is, I began without knowing a network of colleagues to provide referrals to my practice. Fortunately, the Working Women’s Networking Group (WWNG) was born at the same time as I opened my practice. Meetings were held in my office, so women got to know me and began to call upon me for professional help, or help for their children, when they needed it.

I was also known in Open House, a Grenoble-based association dedicated to the needs and interests of the English speaking community, primarily expatriates. At the same time, a French association, AGARO (Association Grenobloise d’Aide à la Recherche en Oncologie), was looking to hire an art therapist for several hours a week to work with adult cancer patients at the CHU Grenoble. All this helped me to start my practice in psychotherapy and in art therapy. Then it grew gradually by word of mouth.

GL: Can you tell me what sort of population you would work with?

ESM: I work with both adults and children, in individual psychotherapy or couples’ therapy for a wide range of difficulties. Most adults I see come for psychotherapy, but some do seek art therapy. Children are usually seen in art therapy or play therapy and adolescents are seen in either psychotherapy or art therapy, depending upon their preference.

The kinds of difficulties that people come to see me for include: anxiety and depression, life crises including divorce, illness and loss, self-destructive patterns, stress, trauma, career decisions, adaptation to life in a new country, parenting consultation, creative blocks, eating disorders, parenting issues, chronic feelings of emptiness or loneliness and life-disrupting symptoms associated with physical or sexual abuse.

GL: Are there any differences concerning public and medical attitudes towards psychotherapy and psychoanalysis between France and the US?

ESM: Yes, I think that the need to seek psychotherapy has gradually become a normal part of the self-discovery process in the US and other countries, whereas in France, many people still attach a certain stigma to the idea of being in therapy. With greater acceptance of life’s difficulties as part of the normal process of living comes the understanding that, with the proper help, improvement can be envisioned.

According to my understanding, psychotherapy practiced by non-medical professionals is not well accepted by the French medical establishment. While this was also the case in the US some years back, the field of practicing non-medical psychotherapists has grown enormously and I think that now we are far beyond that perspective. To give you an example, formerly psychoanalytic institutes restricted candidates exclusively to psychiatrists (medically trained), and then they let in some PhD psychologists. That has since changed, permitting other qualified clinicians to obtain excellent training and further their competencies.

GL: Is your practice bilingual?

ESM: Yes, I do have a bilingual practice. I might add that it’s always an honor for me when French people choose to come to therapy with me, as so often people seek treatment with someone of their own native language and culture. And of course, it’s so important for English-speaking people to be able to express their deepest concerns in their own language to feel understood both from the standpoint of their own culture, and in terms of the expatriate cultural context of their present lives.

GL: You are a specialist in art therapy too, what media do your patients work in and how do you facilitate this?

ESM: I offer a variety of media that permit a wide range of expression, which can be just a few scratches on a paper to imagery that is far more elaborate. Materials include: gouache, clay, pastels, oil crayons, to name some of the basics. No previous art background is necessary, nor is particular talent. I believe that everybody has a story to tell and often that story can be told through imagery or through shapes and lines formed by the sensuous color and textures of the art media. Art materials used therapeutically elicit experimentation and the process of play. When working with children, I also have available other traditional materials such as puppets, blocks, etc.

Even those children who don’t “like” to draw find other ways in engaging in a creative process that becomes therapeutic in art therapy. Children tend to communicate naturally through imagery and play, so art therapy is particularly suitable and is a less stressful form of therapy for them than verbal psychotherapy. Nevertheless, they tend to become comfortable sharing their feelings through metaphor, symbolism and even direct conversation. Adults who have difficulty verbalizing feelings or experiences, such as in the case of trauma or bereavement, benefit from the sensory contact with the media, which often permits them to express themselves in a way that they might not otherwise have been able to do. The creative/therapeutic process involved helps people get in touch with their needs, even for people who would not ordinarily think of themselves as “creative.”

I have done quite a lot of work in the past with adult psychiatric patients who feel more comfortable in an atmosphere where they aren’t pressured to “talk” about themselves. In other words, using art media helps many people engage in therapy at their own rhythm. I think that my background as an art therapist has also informed my approach to psychotherapy and psychoanalysis in paying particular attention to the therapeutic rhythm necessary for each person, whether that person is verbally at ease or less so.

GL: When and how did you come to work in this field?

ESM: I’ve worked in this field for about 30 years, first in New York, where I grew up, studied and also practiced. My undergraduate work was in art, art history and philosophy but I was always drawn to psychology. I heard of art therapy while I was getting a masters’ in a hybrid field called Interrelation of the Arts, in the 70s, at New York University. Fortunately, my graduate program allowed me to craft my own course of studies to a great extent, and I already had experience working with children of all ages. I had been particularly interested in child development, and the development of children’s creativity, how drawing and the expression of fantasy life comes about through art and through dramatic play. Since art therapy was a new field at the time, it was difficult to find enough courses, so I began to take courses and attend workshops and conferences wherever I could find them, all over New York and elsewhere. Of course, I took psychology courses as well.

Then, a pioneering art therapist named Edith Kramer came to teach at NYU, where I was already enrolled as a masters’ degree candidate. She asked me to work with her at Albert Einstein College of Medicine, Jacobi Hospital in the Bronx, in child psychiatry. We worked together for several years and when she retired, she resigned her position to me. I had already been working with pre-schoolers and was fascinated with child development, creativity and what can interfere with it psychologically, so having the two populations back to back was a highly enriching way to learn further.

I did my thesis on body image in children’s art and body movement, where I turned to psychoanalytic writings to help me understand what I was observing. I later worked in a community mental health center in Jersey City, New Jersey, which permitted me to work with children and adults of all ages and all sorts of difficulties, individually and in groups, and where I gained a great wealth of experience. I was assigned all the patients who had any difficulty or reticence about communicating. To further my training as a psychotherapist I then enrolled in The New York School for Psychoanalysis and Psychotherapy, a renowned psychoanalytic training institute from which I graduated.

I have since become a licensed psychoanalyst and licensed creative arts therapist in the State of New York. These licenses permit some patients in my practice to obtain insurance reimbursement.

GL: You use art therapy with patients with very different circumstances – from sufferers of trauma to cancer patients – what are the benefits?

ESM: As in psychotherapy, each patient uses art therapy differently, according to his or her needs, sometimes to handle anxiety, sometimes to deal with “unfinished business” and conflicts that have prevented them from fully becoming the person they hoped to be. Sometimes, patients use art therapy to explore identity or their femininity (in the case of women). This is particularly important in the case of medical illness, such as cancer. The benefits of art therapy include: increased self-understanding, increased self-esteem, a capacity to better handle life’s circumstances, a sense of greater flexibility, sometimes, a better capacity to be nurturing to their children and spouses.

There can be also a rebuilding of the self that takes place with certain people, especially after serious trauma, as experienced in medical illness, even divorce or separation and all sorts of loss and other difficulties. I could go on, but again, there are no guarantees for what will be the specific therapeutic outcomes, as therapeutic benefits always vary. I should add that no substantial change ever happens over night. It is important to add that we can’t predict exactly how long therapy will take; each person is unique with unique needs.

GL: Is this kind of therapy broadly accepted by your peers or are there skeptics?

ESM: Many people today think that a psychoanalytic approach to psychotherapy or to art therapy is outdated. Yet they may be unfamiliar with recent developments in psychoanalytic thinking, from the time of infant observational studies of mothers and children which have yielded a wealth of information on what is needed in terms of building the structure of the psyche in a young child, as well as understanding the corresponding parenting experience. Understanding the different psychological phases of mother-child interaction, and then father-child interaction as well, has greatly informed researchers and psychoanalysts about treatment.

I think that many people view the psychoanalyst as a caricature of the “silent analyst.” Yet, today, at least in a contemporary psychoanalytic American (and usually British) approach, the therapist is much more active, the therapist doesn’t simply pronounce his or her “interpretations,” but the work and relationship is much more collaborative, more as two partners, yet with different roles, each coming to the therapeutic situation with his or her own special competencies to explore and understand the life of that particular patient. Often the psychoanalytic psychotherapist (or psychoanalytically oriented art therapist) will help to rebuild the self, not simply make what was “unconscious conscious,” as was so in classical analysis.

In France, art therapy is as yet an unregulated profession without strict standards for training. The same is true for psychotherapy. Therefore, skeptics can be justifiably concerned as to the competence and credentials of many therapists.

Of course, art therapy is far less well known than psychotherapy, and is practiced in many different ways, often very different from my own approach. I think that when choosing a therapist, it is very important to be careful about whom to choose, especially those promising all sorts of personal transformations and quick results.

GL: You also teach “Psychology in English” at Ecole des Psychologues Praticiens, The Catholic University in Lyon – what are the core themes of this course and who is it for?

ESM: I have taught second year psychology students and now will also teach the third year. The course has two specific aims, one that the students perfect their English and, second, in doing so, they learn an American or British approach to psychology. Since I am not an English teacher per se, I teach the writings in psychology of authors and psychoanalysts whom students probably wouldn’t be exposed to otherwise, or would study in less depth in their other courses.

I also emphasize learning about observational studies involving mothers and children, often through film. I’ve always enjoyed teaching and had taught pre-schoolers in the distant past and graduate students in art therapy for many years at New York University and elsewhere. I’ve supervised the practical work of art therapists and psychotherapists since the 70s, both at New York University and after moving to France. Since 1984, I’ve supervised art therapy interns in Italy (Turin) and Switzerland (Lausanne) and have taught in Paris and Berlin as well. I am passionate about the importance of training of new therapists and enjoy immensely participating in their learning.

GL: Why did you come to Grenoble originally?

ESM: I moved to Grenoble when I married my husband, who was already living here.

GL: You are an artist yourself. Tell us about your work!

ESM: I’ve always returned to my own art as a source of renewal and pleasure, though in recent years, I’ve had far less time to concentrate on my own work. My focus was always on painting and stone sculpture.

GL: Give us some contact information for your practice.

ESM: To make an appointment for a consultation, my phone number is: 04 76 54 03 12. My practice is located at: 1 rue Beyle-Stendhal, Grenoble. Tramway stop: Place de Verdun, Line A.

Map of Grenoble - check!. Photo: Ambrosiana Pictures (G)

Shonah Kennedy – aka Miss Shonah – is an experienced and qualified ESL teacher from Australia. She has agreed to share with Grenoble Life the highs and lows of looking for work in Grenoble as a non-EU citizen.

by Shona Kennedy

It was a hot and oppressively muggy day. However, I had given myself a mission and it had to be accomplished.  Job search time!

Now, I could have just sat down in a park with wifi access somewhere (as the internet connection is still in day four of a possible ten-day operation) and emailed schools in the area and waited patiently for replies, BUT I am a little more masochistic than that, so …

I decided to arm myself with CV, confidence, a smile, comfy shoes, a “never say never” attitude and hit the streets – and as many English language schools as my comfy shoes could take.

This was a mission I was not taking lightly.  I prepared my itinerary over a good cup of morning coffee – again a big thanks to James’ post on English language schools in Grenoble. I started with schools closest to my new house and worked my way around in a clockwise direction – and made most excellent use of Grenoble’s more than efficient public transport system.

I was ready: List of schools – check!  CV – check!  Maps – check!  “Never say never” attitude – double check!  Off I went.

There were some “unknowns”:

Firstly, I had been warned of Grenoblois indifference, however after living on and off in Paris for almost two years I thought I would be able to cope with a little Grenoblois indifference – as I was sure nobody could do that as well as the Parisians (and I mean this with the upmost respect – they have indifference perfected and it truly is an art form).

Secondly, cold calling is not an action I personally like.  Cold calling reminds me of the pool game “Marco Polo”.  One person knows exactly what is going on – where in the pool they can move, running around, laughing at the other blindfolded person aimlessly trying to follow the replied “polo”, to their desperate calls of “marco”, when (and if) it is called out. In this job searching endeavour I felt like the one running around the pool knowing exactly where I was going – especially because I had a map!  And the poor unsuspecting English Language institutes were the ones with the blindfolds on.

Thirdly, my French is bad – no actually it is worse than bad.  Can you get worse than bad?  Well, if that is acceptable, that is where I am on the badness scale!  I have taken classes (top of the theory test, please note!) and I can see the words in my head – I can even spell them!  I can hear the sentence perfectly spoken in my fantasy scenario … then there is some sort of malfunction between my head and my mouth, unfortunately they do not co-operate and what emerges is an awful hodgepodge of spoken French with an Australian twang that does zero justice to this beautifully flowing language.

There were some “knowns”:

Firstly, I love teaching English as a second language.  It is fun!  As a teacher I have fun (and learn), and the students hopefully have fun, learn and teach (unknowingly) too!  So, basically I want to work (a very big positive when job searching!), and the quicker the better. By treading the streets I am speeding up the whole process!

Secondly, I have just arrived in this area, so what better way to meet people than to work.  Again, the quicker I can do this the happier life will be.

Thirdly, I have a carrot dangling at the end of a stick – I promised myself a new phone when I acquire a great job!

Oh!  And lastly, I am an Australian.  Sadly I don’t have a European passport, valid ancestry or any magic card up my sleeve that – at the moment – allows me to work in France.  However, I had heard a rumour that companies can “sponsor” people for work; therefore I thought I would see if there was any truth behind this whispering.

So … weighing up the “unknowns” and “knowns” I decided my best bet was to hit the streets.

The first school was curtly efficient.  She was nice, all smiles and positive.  However, she told me directly they were in no need for any new teachers – at this time (perhaps next week, then?!).

After that it was a breeze!  Everyone I met was friendly, enthusiastic and, at a stretch, encouraging.  As expected everyone cringed at my French and most changed immediately to English – I think more to stop me murdering the French language!  Everyone took my CV and said they would give it to the “right” person (which I am sure wasn’t just “a line” as, within the 24 hours post this little adventure I was contacted by 75% of the schools!).

On other positive notes: as a new resident to this gorgeous city, it was a fabulous way to get my bearings and use the public transport system.  I got some exercise walking the streets and I was able to practise my halting French (it can only get better)!

Job searching at street level is definitely a great way to overcome fears of: rejection, isolation, language and getting lost.  I would suggest (as James did to me) to get out there and show prospective employees what you are made of.  And really the worst anyone can ever say to you is “no” and what have you lost then? Nothing!

On that note this teacher of English (still looking for work) is slightly stuffed after all that walking, talking and – I must admit – enjoying.

Maria Montessori

Martine Grzelack runs The Montessori International School of Grenoble, opening September 2009. Grenoble Life wanted to know more about the new centre, the background of the staff and the famous Montessori method.

Grenoble Life: When does the Montessori International School of Grenoble open and what is your role?

Martine Grzelack: In September 2009, we’ll be lucky to find a bilingual Montessori School in the suburbs of Grenoble. It will be situated in Meylan. This school will enable children to study and work while developing their personality. My mission will be to look after the children and to run this school so that everything works out well to the benefit of everyone.

GL: What is the Montessori method?

MG: The Montessori International School of Grenoble is a private school, ruled by a not-for-profit association (association loi 1901).

The school curriculum follows the French national education programmes for early childhood and primary schools.

Committed to the highest education standards, the school proposes a bilingual curriculum in French and in English.

The MIG team will provide an individual learning experience for each child, which promotes physical, social, emotional and intellectual development to help them achieve their maximum potential.

Following the Montessori requirements, the children are dispatched into two age groups: 3 to 6 years old (early childhood) and 6 to 12 years old (elementary).

GL: What is your experience with using this method?

MG: I have been working for six years according to the Montessori pedagogy. First, I attended a teaching practice course at the Centre de recherche d’études de formation et de liaison des activités Montessori (CRELAM) in Rennes – a French institute which doesn’t grant an Association Montessori Internationale diploma. Then, I went to Switzerland to obtain an AMI diploma for children from 6 to 12. This method enables the children to open out in their development while being in the pleasure of learning and discovering. Children gain an autonomy and maturity which enables them to make choices.

GL: Why did you originally train to teach the Montessori method?

MG: I discovered this pedagogy while thinking about the educational system in France. Coming from a very different horizon – I graduated as a geologist – I wanted to work with children after having worked with engineers-to-be (I was in charge of professional training in my firm).

After preparing the examinations to be a school teacher, I realized that the “group pedagogy” wasn’t satisfying for me. I looked for something different. Some friends had their son in a Montessori school and that’s how this wonderful adventure started.

GL: What age groups do you teach at the Montessori International School of Grenoble?

MG: The International Montessori School is open to children from 3 to 12 years old. They are dispatched in groups of three or six years according to Maria Montessori’s method. It is important not to keep a child exclusively in his or her age group.

GL: How does the methodology differ from that used in the French state schools for these age groups?

What is different from the French school is mainly the learning approach through the senses, with the help of the adequate and attractive equipment created by Maria Montessori herself. Moreover, the work in classes with mixed ages enables each child to learn with pleasure because there are no barriers between the different learning activities.

Montessori International School of Grenoble

GL: Do you have classes in French and English? Will these classes be taught separately?

MG: In each class, there is a French teacher and an English speaking assistant who participates throughout the school day. The teachers offer help to the children that ask for it in their mother tongue, in order to encourage interest in languages. There will also be Spanish classes organized.

GL: Why has it been decided to open a school here in Grenoble?

MG: I wanted to work in a school where the pedagogy is adapted to each child and gives them what they need academically for their future studies. I want to be able to share with these families a teaching method which deeply respects the child as an individual and as a learner.

GL: What is the profile of the parents who have registered their children to come to the school?

MG: The parents who send their children to a Montessori school come from different backgrounds: managerial staff in large firms, teachers at “public” schools, professional workers, employees, people working in tertiary industries … they have varied profiles but they have the same aim: their children’s well-being.

GL: Tell us about the teaching team.

MG: The teaching team is composed of two educators with an international Montessori diploma and an English or French speaking assistant according to the class. It is a dynamic team, very motivated to help the children improve, respectful of the Montessori pedagogy.

GL: Will you have recruitment opportunities in the future? What are the advantages of working at Montessori International School of Grenoble?

MG: Yes, we hope that we’ll have to recruit next year, or in two years to open new class. Why not offer children the opportunity to learn another language like German for example … but we don’t want the school to lose its soul by recruiting too many pupils or staff. We thank you for these questions.

GL: You’re welcome, thank you!

The Montessori International School of Grenoble
Boulevard des Alpes, 38240 Meylan
+33 6 72 66 76 32
ecole@montessori-grenoble.com

Lolly the taxi, Les Petits Bilingues mascot!

Shaké Manoukian is manager of Les Petits Bilingues in Grenoble, an English language  learning centre for children. Grenoble Life wanted to find out more about her background, the school, the methodology and their new centre opening in September.

Grenoble Life: What is your involvement at Les Petits Bilingues?

Shaké Manoukian: I’m the manager of Les Petits Bilingues – Grenoble. We are part of a national network. Les Petits Bilingues was founded in 1992 in Lille as a family oriented playgroup, and now is a big network with 30 centres in all of France (even in La Réunion!). We all profit from a strong pedagogical staff, with a deep knowledge of English teaching to children.

Personally I’m Italian and I learnt French and English in my childhood with no effort. I wanted to give the same opportunity to my children and that is the reason why we came to Grenoble four years ago. For the same reason last year I decided to set up les Petits Bilingues in town. I wanted to offer French children the chance to improve their English. I was tired of my French friends saying, “Ah nous les Français nous sommes nulls avec les langues….”. Learning other languages as children is much easier and more efficient.

Les Petits Bilingues is a periscolaire learning centre – we provide English lessons to children aged 3 to 11. We work mainly on Wednesdays and Saturdays, but also late afternoons after school. During the week our lessons are one hour long, on Saturday they are 1h30 and we share a snack with the children.

GL: Les Petits Bilingues is a franchise. Who brought the franchise to this region and why?

SM: In summer 2008, I brought Les Petits Bilingues to Grenoble, and their mascot Lolly, a real Black Cab from London. I was looking for some experience in English for my daughter and I realized that what was on offer in Grenoble was weak and unstructured. I discovered the national network and built it up in our region.

GL: What is the methodology at Les Petits Bilingues?

SM: At LPB we want to have fun. Children and teachers come here to share a fun experience in English. In French there is the word ludique which is a mix of pleasure and education, and that is exactly what we do.

Our approach is by immersion, we never use translation, we talk non-stop, we repeat continuously and we indicate with pictures, actions, and gestures.

We have a yearly program, with a specific theme each week and a defined phonetic subject we practice with children. Our tools are games, songs, rhymes, arts and craft…

We really try to make the children speak spontaneously in English.

GL: What is the typical profile of the parents of children at Les Petits Bilingues?

SM: I would say that 70% of our families are French. They want that their children to become comfortable with foreign languages from the very young age. They are aware of the advantages that represents.

The other 30% are either  “mixed families” with two or more languages spoken at home, or families who have lived abroad, where children already have good English and wish to keep it fluent.

GL: What is the typical profile of a teacher at Les Petits Bilingues?

SM: All my teachers are required to be  native speakers, and this is part of our pedagogical project. Our kids are in direct contact with a person coming from an other culture, they can discover traditions, tricks, and accents. Our teachers spent their childhood in an English environment and therefore are the only ones who can transfer this atmosphere to our students.

They are all child-teaching professionals with at least two years of full time experience.

GL: Why do you think parents want their children to come to Les Petits Bilingues?

SM: There are different reasons related to the age of children. For the very young ones, under six, parents with a bilingual project for their children don’t have in Grenoble the choice of a bilingual  école maternelle, they are then very happy to find a place where their children can approach English with a specific program for this age group.

For the children at this age it is very important to identify language with a place, when they come to LPB it is as if they were doing a trip to an “English speaking country”. Our classes are always decorated with posters and pictures related to English Countries and that helps them understand why they learn English.

For the primary school parents, reasons are similar: they want a professional approach and even if most of schools have some English lessons it is never enough, and it is rarely taught by native speakers.

GL: What is the ideal age for children to start learning English as a second language?

SM: It is never too early, before the age of six children are developing their phonetic system. Even babies can tell the difference between mother tongue and a second language;  they can tell the difference and parents shouldn’t be concerned over confusion. Learning a second language very early makes it very easy to learn other languages in the future because the brain is already organized to learn them.

We accept children from three years old for practical reasons, we offer group activities and without parents.  We are evaluating a new project “mums, dads and babies” groups, starting next year to answer the need for under-threes.

GL: Why do you think learning English has become so important in France?

SM: It is not just in France: despite the efforts of a few English has become the international language, and it is not only in the business world, it is also necessary for travelling (and French people love to travel around the world!). If you want to check something on internet, watch a movie, listen a song, English has become a fundamental need. As I said before, English can be the first language learnt but children will often add more foreign languages, and if you start as a child it is so much easier!

GL: Have you faced any resistance from parents to the methodology used at Les Petits Bilingues?

SM: I guess that our main problem was to “educate” parents, since often in France people want concrete results. In the process of learning languages everybody needs time, and everybody has their own rhythm. If you think that a toddler needs at least two years to speak fluently in his or her mother tongue, you can’t expect with one hour per week to have a bilingual child after one year. Some children love to repeat everything, others prefer to be really sure about their knowledge and they may surprise you with a full sentence from one day to another.

GL: I understand that you are opening a new centre soon – tell us about that.

SM: From September 2009 we will have a second centre in the Grésivaudan area, in Montbonnot, on the Route Nationale. We know that in this area there are a lot of international families planning to relocate to English speaking countries, and we want to offer them a centre closer to their homes.

GL: What recruitment opportunities do you have? What are the advantages of working at Les Petits Bilingues?

SM: We search for native English speaking teachers with a lot of energy and consistent professional experience working with children. We are a group and we work a lot together, sharing ideas and teaching approach. We work in a specific atmosphere where we enjoy our work; we can be very creative but at the same time we are very vigilant of our pedagogy.

GL: What kind of feedback have you had from parents of students at the school?

SM: They are all very happy, we provide also extra activities such as a puppet show with an English company, a LPB Day, a visit to Natural History Museum, and for next year we have many other projects … parents also like to join us in these activities and practice their English too!

GL: Give us some contact info

SM: Starting September we will have two centres in Grenoble : one in town (9 place de Metz) and one in Grésivaudan (508 rue Général de Gaulle in Montbonnot). For further details please contact us at 04 38 92 01 01 or grenoble@lespetitsbilingues.com or visit our websites for 3 to 12 years and 12 to 18 years.

For those looking for teaching work in Grenoble I’ve been promising some contact information on companies that offer English language training in and around the city for some time now. I’ve made a list below, including full contact information, links to websites and email addresses where possible. Please feel free to use the comments box to suggest others should you know any other schools, or if you want to share experiences working at any of these institutions.

Abaque Isère – Soutien scolaire à domicile

9 Rue Paul Bert
38000 Grenoble
Tél: 04 38 37 20 28
Fax : 04 38 02 08 64
contact@abaque-isere.com

A.F.S.I.C. (Action Formation Continue Ingénierie Conseil)

36 Bis rue des Vingt Toises
38950 Saint Martin le Vinoux
Tél : 04 38 86 45 08
Fax : 04 38 86 45 09

Brown School

20, avenue de la Houille Blanche
38170 Seyssinet-Pariset
Isère – France
Tél. + 33 (0)4 76 48 35 05
maria.brown@brownschool.fr

C.E.L. (Centre d’Etudes de Langues)

Grenoble Chamber of Commerce and Industry
7 rue Hoche
38000 Grenoble
Tél. : 04 76 28 29 67
Fax : 04 76 28 26 13

Demos

Europôle
4 place Robert Schuman
38000 Grenoble
Tél. : 04 76 49 96 19
Fax : 04 76 49 94 71
grenoble@demos.fr

F.L.O.R. (Formation Langues Org. Ressources Humaines)

Parc Sud Galaxie
38130 Echirolles
Tél. : 04 76 09 15 72
Fax : 04 76 40 37 46
flor.flor@wanadoo.fr

Greta Alpes-Dauphiné et Greta Sud-Isère

1-3, rue des Trembles
38100 Grenoble
Tél. : 04 76 33 27 63

Infolangues

« Le Trident »
34 avenue de l’Europe
38100 Grenoble
Tél. : 04 76 22 78 20
Fax : 04 76 22 78 28

John Evans

8 rue Ampère
Bâtiment B
38000 Grenoble
Tél. : 04 76 48 22 35

Logos

ZI Mayencin
Parc Equation
4 allée de Bethléem
38610 Gières
Tél. : 04 76 59 19 80
Fax : 04 76 59 19 90
logos@logos.fr

Montessori International School of Grenoble

19, chemin de la Duy
38240 Meylan
Contact : + 33 4 76 89 02 75
ecole@montessori-grenoble.com

Options

76 rue des Alliés
38100 Grenoble
Tél. : 04 76 33 18 39
Fax : 04 76 33 18 40

Les Petits Bilingues Grenoble

9 place de Metz
38000 Grenoble
Tél : 04 38 92 01 01
grenoble@lespetitsbilingues.com

Wall Street Institute

14 avenue Albert 1er de Belgique
38000 Grenoble
Tél. : 04 76 12 25 12

and

1080 chemin de la Croix Verte
38330 Montbonnot
Tél. : 04 76 12 25 12

Grenoble, a vibrant student city and self-styled Captial of Alps, is France’s second biggest city for English language training after Paris. The high number of international companies in Grenoble – principally from the scientific and technological sectors – means there is also a large ex-pat community. In a globalised world – and in an increasingly globalised France – where English is the language of business communication, the demand for in-house English training has escalated. The fact that companies in France are obliged to spend a percentage of their budgets on training for their staff also contributes, as does every employee’s legal entitlement to a certain number of hours’ training for every year of work (known in France as the DIF – Droit Individuel à la Formation/Individual Right to Training). English is a popular choice for people claiming training hours under the DIF – those who recognise the value of learning English both in the workplace and for travel – but many more employees are obliged to undertake English training in order to effectively carry out their duties.

In Grenoble the English training contracts are competed for a by a number of ‘schools‘ which are essentially agencies that send (normally) native English speakers to train staff ‘in-company‘. With the exception of the Wall Street Institute – an American franchise with three centres in the Isere region that adopts a largely computer-based, self-study method – these schools ultimately differ little in their product. The company pays the agency a fee which covers the school’s administration costs, the teacher’s salary and transport fees. Some of the schools insist the teacher follows a particular book with his or her students but generally the teachers in Grenoble have quite a free role. Most companies insist on a certain amount of by-telephone training, a popular requirement easily and willingly provided by the schools. Furthermore, schools who send teachers to train clients ‘in company’ often need their staff to be able to drive in order to visit two (or occasionally more) companies in one day. It is highly unlikely a car would be provided – although I have heard of a school in Lyon doing this – but teachers are normally compensated, sometimes generously, for petrol.

From my experience in Grenoble these schools find it difficult to find suitable candidates who are settling in Grenoble for the long term. The majority of English teachers fall into two broad categories: ex-patriots with husbands or wives working in the city and former University students looking to extend their stay in the city. There are few experienced CELTA or TEFL-equivalent trained teachers coming to Grenoble to teach in the way that such individuals are attracted to the Far East, South America or even other Southern European countries. This may be because the schools in Grenoble rarely advertise on the popular ESL job forums that feed the market, because France does not offer the cheap living of the developing world and partly because Grenoble is not a particularly easy city in which to find accomodation. Furthermore, few schools will entertain recruiting a teacher from abroad. Being here is the single biggest advantage when teaching needs can be urgent.

While France’s administrative complexity and high cost of living may deter some career EFL teachers, it is also one of the few countries that can offer a decent salary with the full social security entitlements that come with it. Teaching salaries vary between approximately 1,500-1,800 euros per month which, while not a fortune, is very much a livable wage and in the environs of the national average. What is also very attractive about teaching in France is the possibility of obtaining a permanent contract or CDI (contrat à durée indéterminée) which is virtually an iron-cast job-for-life guarantee in a country with extraordinarily protective laws benefitting workers. While many teachers may get a temporary contract or ‘CDD’ (contrat à durée déterminée) in the first instance, companies can only offer two such contracts consecutively before becoming obliged to offer a permanent one if they want to keep the teacher on. In my experience, schools in Grenoble generally reward hard-working teachers with CDIs eventually rather have to look for new ones after having given out two CDDs. My impression is also that there is not enough competition for places in English teaching agencies. Teachers are often recruited without the qualifications (CELTA, TESOL etc.) or experience demanded elsewhere in the world.

There are other opportunites to teach English at Université Stendhal as a Vacataire or Lecteur/Lectrice posts which command large hourly wage (50 euros plus!). To fuly benefit from being a vacataire, teachers are not normally paid for preparation time and are obliged to have what is known as a ‘principal employer’ to avoid paying oversized social security contributions. In most such cases the teacher will work part time for one of the schools offering company training and part time in faculty. Lecteur and Lectrice posts, while paid very well, are normally only given as one or two-year contracts. As far as I am aware it is impossible to obtain a permanent post such as this. Similalry, the Ecole de Management offers a range of programmes in English for which a University degree and teaching experience often suffice. Again, the need for a principal employer applies. With the Projet Géant at Europole there are also plans to massively expand the university and open a new business school. Therefore the opportunties to teach English in the city look primed to increase rapidly.

With the numbers of British taking French at school in decline theoretically the number erasmus year students is dropping also. However, relaxed working VISA rules for Canadians, Australians and New Zealanders are starting to compensate. While some schools may prefer candidates already settled or planning to settle in Grenoble long-term, shorter stay candidates may also prove advantageous for schools which prefer to offer temporary (CDD) contracts when possible.

Here are some step-by-step instructions on how to present yourself to potential teacher employers in Grenoble.

1) Submit your CV in Engish and French. Not all of the schools are managed by native English speakers, so making an effort with this should ensure a bigger response.

2) Make an effort to communicate in French. Being able to speak French is an advantage but not crucial to teaching English in Grenoble. Having the capacity to liaise with human resouces managers (for in-company training) will be a big advantage. Brushing up on your school French will also benefit you in beginner classes.

3) Give the impression you want to stay in Grenoble long-term. Turning up at an interview with a backback or snowboard will not go down well. Schools want people with a professional attitude and a genuine interest in pedagogy – if you give the impression you are just looking to fund your favourite winter sport you will be shooting yourself in the foot.

4) Get a car. The majority of English teaching work in Grenoble is in-company training. Schools often require their teachers to be mobile, often expecting them to teach classes in up to three different companies in one day.