My current life in the US: vélo, boulot, dodo
- La Chocolatine Voyageuse
- 30 sept. 2018
- 3 min de lecture
My seventh week in the USA has just come to an end. The temperatures have cooled down, the leaves are slowly turning yellow and orange and the wind by the lake is a little bit fresher than it was at the beginning of the semester. It’s just been seven weeks but it feels like I’ve been here for years. Routine has settling in, I’ve gotten used to my busy weeks, to my job, to my students, to my life with my housemates whom I can now call my friends. And life here is nice but busy so that makes our time go by so fast...
We work hard during the week, between the classes we teach, the events we have to organise and all the reading we have to do for the courses we attend, we surely are kept busy. And then every Saturday we rent a car and go for a day trip. I like it that way but sometimes I feel like I don’t have time for anything although I still am able to go to the gym after work every day and watch Netflix every evening. It’s just that I don’t have time to reflect on the lessons I gave (what went wrong, what worked well, etc) nor do I have time to fully enjoy and appreciate my life here. I blame routine for that. I’m not really familiar with routine because I used to always do something different every week when I lived in Dublin or Sydney or London. But these are bigger cities so they obviously offer more options and possibilities... I think I need to get used to the fact that I live in a town now. Well, at least it’s a lovely one!
As nothing very exciting has happened these past couple of weeks and as my life has only revolved around work lately, I wanted to go back to the students‘ behaviour and to the students/professor relationships topics because this is a striking difference with France and Europe in general... I thought teaching in a college with older students (and supposedly more mature ones) would be easier than teaching in a secondary school with uncontrollable teenagers but oh well I was wrong... In the US, students are, in my opinion, overprotected by their professors sometimes. They expect you to be there for them at any time – they send you crazy emails about anything even over the weekend and sometimes even without signing it or starting with 'hey'. They really have a different notion of what respect is and they take you for granted. When I was at university in France, never in my life would have I dared sending an email to any of my professors asking for the missed lesson – no I had to find a way to get it by myself, through my classmates.
Students here constantly need to be reminded about their homework, about the fact they have to study and learn their vocab, they need to be taught how to study properly,... I don't think it's helping them to grow up and become autonomous to do everything for them like that and I was absolutely not willing to do that at the beginning but it's easy to get caught and of course I'm here to help them and not fail them...
But anyway I have to admit I am quite lucky with my students – they are not that demanding and they are rather independent and serious even though I have many first years (17, 18 year olds). But my housemates/colleagues have some insane stories with their students and they work overtime most days because their students need them.
But lucky us, next weekend we are leaving Geneva for a well-deserved holiday: it’s Fall recess here so that means we have 4 days off and we’ve decided to go to Boston for the weekend and then to Cape Cod for two days, a village on the coast where we‘ve booked a cottage by the beach. I love Geneva but I can’t wait to finally go away and be in a big city and live new adventures.
To end this article, here are some pictures of the day trips we've done so far so you can see how beautiful NY state is...
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