The Last Day of Classes

In past blogs I've talked about some of the teaching strategies here, but this time I wanted to share a few pictures along with a description of "le laboratoire" or "la chambre de torture" as it is fondly referred to. Everyday for an hour, each class participates in the language lab. The picture below is where the prof is seated. I'm sorry I didn't get a picture with Bruno in his chair. From there, he has us work through a series of audio exercises to reinforce lessons taught in the classoom such as verb conjugations, pronoun placement etc. It is also meant to strengthen our listening comprehension and pronunciation. We repeat the same exercises over and over while he introduces different subjects, verbs, pronouns etc. for us to integrate into the sentence structure. The hope is, at the end, it becomes reflexive or instinctive rather than analyzing each word.

This picture is rather contrived. We definitely don't smile during the lab. Take note of "les casques" - headphones to listen to the exercises and the microphone in which we give our responses. 

Although the lab was rather arduous, I believe it was very useful. Below is a picture of some of my colleagues, Laila, Doug and Lynn in our tiny classroom. For the last two weeks, there were only seven of us in the class and three of us were Canadian!

On the last day of classes, Douglas kindly brought a bottle of champagne and chocolates for us to share. We enjoyed both as we finished our last debate on "country versus city living". Because Laila and Douglas were both leaving at the end of the day, we decided to give Bruno his gift of wine and chocolates along with a card signed by each of us. It was an absolute pleasure to have him as a prof and I thank him for his patience, support, humour and sage advice.

After school, Jackie (R) invited Larry and I to join her for a glass of wine on the terrace that we shared in our complex. What a lovely way to end the final day classes!