Drama at school and maintaining good frame

This is something that has been ongoing. So let me start from the beginning.

I started work at my school in early October. I work at Lycee Thoedore Deck in small town called Guebwiller.

Since this is my third time doing an overseas program like this I felt like I was quite prepared for this new experience. That is why I haven't really written an dedicated post about my school life here. And to be fair it has been quite relaxed and calm here. There are just certain things about the way my schedule is run that I do not like.

I work 12 hours a week. My hours change everyweek because I am working with the whole school. So in order for me to achieve this the teachers write their names on a schedule prior to the start of the week. This is a bad system for both me and the students. It is bad for me because I don't have a fixed schedule. Therefore it is very difficult to plan trips. Sometimes I come into school for 1 hour and go home right after. In this case the whole day is wasted because I cannot leave my small town. Thus my social life suffers. Other times I come into the school for 2 hours but there is a 4 hour gap in between the classes, once again my social life suffers. Now this system of work hours is also bad for the students because they do not have continuation with my classes. Because I am seeing so many students, I estimate I will see each student for my class only up to 3 times in the whole school year! This means it is hard to build up that rapport with students, I cannot build upon my lessons and furthermore, the students cannot be expected to remember what I taught them last class.

The old me would have just seen this problem and quietly taken it sitting down. But as it stands I saw the problem, considered possible solutions and (tried to) work out a solution with my collegues. 

I scheduled a meeting with my responsable at the school Aurelie and I presented her with my situation eliciting empathy and using active listening. She was quite responsive and listened to my arguments. I presented her with the solutions as I saw them:

1. Have a fixed schedule of working 3 days (that moves every week). For example work Monday-Wednesday week 1, then work Tuesday-Thursday week 2. This way I get to still see all the classes like they wanted (even though I think that is a bad idea for the reasons I mentioned earlier)

2. Stack my hours so I work 24 hours a week instead of 12 hours a week. Then I get one week off.
Aurelie said that is not legal.

3. Just have one day off and work 4 days.

At the meetings end it was very amiable and Aurelie sais she thinks we can do #3. Not my first choice but alas cest la vie and still better than before of working 5 days.

Fast forward to today, Aurelie told me she talked with the other teachers and they will try to give me at least Monday off but it is not do-able every week. I did not want them to make this overtly nice gesture but then simply fall back on their escape clause. Thus I pushed harder; to which Aurelie got physiologically defensive and her body language changed. She intoned that I was lazy and my only objective in France was to play and have a good time. I wasn't going to lie, those are both true. Thus I responded with: "You know you are right Aurelie, my main motivation this year is to travel, learn French and have a good time. I am not trying to become a teacher in the future. But I maintained my frame through the whole conversation and did not lose my cool. She was taken back by my honesty. Also I high fived her in the end like a boss haha.

I was quite proud and happy about this interaction. In fact this is the reason why I am writing this post. It shows my progress of self development. Where as previously I would have bottled up my thoughts and emotions or expressed them in an angry outburst. Now I am able to be like water and simply take the shape of the cup. Furthermore whereas before I would have ruminated on the conversation and what took place, now I can simply relax and not let these external circumstances affect my frame. I felt happy throughout the day despite this interaction.

Will update with more to come. I was actually considering simply quitting as well at one point last month since my self development has stagnated since coming to France. But now I think this presents a new challenge and I have one other MAJOR reason for staying here to which you already know ;)

Peace from Guebwiller.

P.S. Came by this article which pretty much sums up my frame of mind at this point, although I need to work harder too. http://markmanson.net/not-giving-a-fuck

Pizza House Party

This past weekend I had another house party! It was amazing as always. There was good food, drinks and good company. I told one friend: When life gives you lemons, make everyone come to little G (the name of my town).

Aftermath

Anna making the birthday cake for Emily

Add caption

Birthday girl Emily. 

Loic and I went and bought pizza material and made homemade pizzas for everyone. Everyone stayed over and we partied till 3 in the morning. There wasn't enough sleeping surfaces in my house for everyone so some people had to sleep on the floor. I am really glad I bought the air mattress last time as that really came in handy.

Heres is to more parties to come!

Catsu Catsu.

P.S. It was Emily's birthday so we also celebrated that the day after the party.

Peace from Guebwiller.

New Years Resolution: Lucid dreaming

As you know I live in a very small town, and as a result my experience has been very different than previous years when I did language assistant programs.

In Korea I really started to get into self development specifically social aspects and coming out of my comfort zone. I built on that last year in Quebec. But this year it is harder to focus on those goals with my current town and the lack of access to public transportation and the big city.

That is why I have decided to focus more on self development as opposed to social skills. With that in mind I read up on more lucid dreaming and began my program.

Lucid dreaming is a dream state in which a person is able to know they are in a dream and eventually be able to control their actions in that dream. I had first heard about this concept from my psychology professor in university. I had tried to cultivate the skill in university but alas I lacked willpower and could not keep up with my program. This time I am determined to succeed and my first success today was a great boost.

When we sleep we have 4 different stages. From stage 1-3 + REM (rapid eye movement). REM is the deep stage of sleep where we are catatonic and dreams occur. In order to reach the state of lucidity in this stage it is important to train yourself to do reality checks during normal day situations so that when you are in the dream state you will remember to do the checks as well. I choose to pinch myself on the cheek and had been doing it for about two days now. In addition you are supposed to keep a dream journal and write down everything that you remember about your dream. The idea is that there will be recurring images/symbols/themes and once you figure that out you will be able to identify that you are in a dream. The journal also helps with remembering your dreams which is the first step to lucid dreaming.

So here is what happened. Yesterday I had my first class of the new year. I had slept only 3 hours because I had insomnia and didn't sleep until 4am. Today was the second day back to school and I had a class at 8am. Because I had slept very little yesterday I went to bed quite early at around 7:30pm. Unfortunately I was woken up around 10pm by the noises from the kitchen. I live next door to the communal kitchen and my roommate Loic was cleaning up some dishes and I heard the pots and pans clacking. Now fully awake I went on my computer to play some video games until 3am when I went back to bed, I quickly drifted to sleep but at around 5am I heard some clacking sounds again next to my bed, I thought it sounded like the sounds that Loic was making earlier. I was so sleepy I didn't think about how it could be there would be noises right next to my bed. So I rolled over and tried to swat away the noise. But the sensation of hitting the wall with my hands didn't register. That is when I realized! I might be in a dream! So remembering my training I tried to do a reality check by pinching my face. My body wouldn't move! Now I was sure of it I am in a dream! That is when my head started shaking and my ears started to ring, and finally I snapped out of the dream and into reality. The whole episode probably lasted a couple of minutes max.

I had actually read about this earlier, usually this is what happens when you are trying to lucid dream for the first time. You become so excited once you realize that you are in a dream that your adrenaline shoots up and that pulls you out of the dream. There are specific techniques that you can do to keep yourself in the dream for longer and I will try that next time.

I am very happy about my progress and parts of my success I owe to the techniques I read online. But another part is this new application I have been using called sleep cycle alarm. The app uses the phone's accelerometer to detect sudden movements from your bed as you toss and turn in the night. It then wakes you up when you are not in REM sleep so that you can have a good nights rest. In addition it has a helpful graph which tracks your sleep states throughout the night. I was so sure of my times because of this graph which you can see below.

As you can see, I feel asleep at 7pm, got woken up at around 10pm. Then I got out of bed and didn't actually turn off the app, so the little spikes which indicate I was in deep sleep from 11-2:30am is actually false. The spikes are the detection of my moving around in the room on my computer. Finally I went back to sleep at 2:30 and I believe the lucid dream episode occured at around 5am - as I was pulled out of the dream I moved around the bed a bit and that registered. I fuckin love this app! This is only my second day of testing it and further testing needs to be done to be conclusive on whether it works as intended or not. But preliminary result are very promising! 

Peace from Guebwiller.

New Years Party and more Party

I spent the new years with some new friends at my house party that lasted for 2 more days.

I met up with Alexis, Molly and Clayton in Colmar on the last day of the year. They are all assistants living in Alsace. Alexis is from Canada and Molly and Clayton are from America. This was the first or second time I met any of them. We are one of the few assistants who stayed in this region during winter break.

Coincidentally it was also the birthday of my friend Alexis and she wanted to go ice skating. So we all did that first. After skating we all went back to my place and the plan was to buy groceries together and cook ensemble! But something went wrong, it seems shops are closed way earlier on new years eve - go figure. So we actually could not buy any drinks or food. Luckily I had some stuff left over in my fridge and I made some pizza and Chinese stir fry for everyone.

We spent new years eve celebrating in my little house doing charades, karaoke and even some salsa dancing. Haha it was really fun and I'm glad I got to spend new years eve with some new friends.

Karaoke at my house with Molly and Alexis. More photos to come

New years day Clayton invited everyone to his house in Erstein (a small village close to Strasbourg). There was the carrot of rock climbing after so I couldn't turn down the offer. So up we all went packed up our things and spent the night at Claytons place. We did some geocaching in the town of Erstein to pass the time, watched Rumble in the Bronx and did some double yoga at his house.

Finally we did rock climbing yesterday in Strasbourg and it was great! I started to remember some of the techniques which I forgot last time and tried to do some 6A routes. Alexis lives in Strasbourg and she bought a 10 pack session to the gym so I think I will be making more trips to Strasbourg. Or at least that's what she keeps bugging me about!

Clayton, Molly, Alexia, me and some random kid who photobombed us lols?

Peace from Guebwiller.