Respect ! :) Yes, best to remember the nice kids and colleagues. They do exist, after all !
I got to stay in my dept because of my capes ranking and then got my local-ish lycée (22km away) because of rapprochement de conjoint and 5 children ;-). I used to teach German but switched to English to guarantee full-time hours & a job closer to home (many more posts in English than in German, so I had to do the English capes). I love my job but I'm lucky, my colleagues are lovely & some of my pupils are too - & most are at least OK ;-)
Hi Véronique - I know all that but informative for the others. Fortunately I had enough "ancienneté" to mange an échelon 7, etc. ( many more rules come into consideration), so I was "mutéed" only 80 kms away, in the same département as I live in. I spent 2 years in lycée + collège. Arrrggghhh. No life, no "considération", inhumane hours (sleeping most of the time only 3-4 hrs / night just to be ready for the next day), inhumane tutors. Not able to give assistance to my own daughter with school stuff. God I was glad when it was over. I even considered writing about it. Would have been fun - revenge can be sweet I assume - but also painful. It could have put a few things straight too so that it wouldn't happen to other trainees. Actually... It did. Hum hum. And yet passing the Capes feels like you've achieved the unachievable. What a waste.
On top of a nasty stomach bug, caught pneumonia cause of a kid in class ( I'm sure it was, he was caughing all the time... and my immune system being -10 at the time...), ended up in hospital for 5 days at the end of the school year. Not a word from management to enquire about my health. Just one colleague, a German teacher phoned me. Were they checking up on me somehow ? :D
Never mind, that belongs to the past now. Stupid and nasty people too.
What accent ? :D
I know, I married one :s
Fortunately for him, I do understand his humour - or got used to it, I suppose. Anyway, whenever we gather in the summer with our vacanciers for an alfresco evening meal, we have a good laugh.
How did you manage with the accent, Christine? I do know that 'Pool boyos are excellent humourists :)
The problem isn't doing well enough in the capes, it is becoming a civil servant and having to go where the ministry sends you according to the Byzantine points system. If you don't have lots of children & aren't also pacsed or married (so you have points for rapprochement de conjoint + more for the children) then you get sent anywhere but where you want to be.
Well I went to live there at 20. For 12 years or so. Being French, it was nice and interesting to experience something else than my little Catalan place (Perpignan / Cabestany). Nice to earn a living at last, nice to have a bit of freedom (public transport was very bad then in Cabestany... I'm not sure it's much better now - still very bad in the Vendée in most places, ours is anyway), a change of scenery and mentality were what I needed. Back in France, it's the general mentality I miss. Jobwise, it was much easier. Mentality / professional attitude in the workplace in general much better (education). Mind you, I have encountered just everything, very good and even very bad over here in the French education system regarding mentality in the workplace (since 2003). The very bad nearly cost me a burn-out and the wishful thinking that I could "casser la gueule" to 2 or 3 people who well diserved it... Long story... documented, mind you but I decided not to use it as sometimes the past best belongs to the past. It's just very frustrating instead. But all that is well behind me now as I've been working part-time in a very nice environment for the past year or so ... til the end of my contract in June 2015 (Contrat aidé). Then what? ... You never now, I might go back to Liverpool :)
Also, in the UK I felt European. Back in France, they want you to think you are but they submit you to their own stupid little rules, esp. regarding diplomas... For example, the PGCE is not fully recognised in France . You need to take + pass a concours to do the same job. But if you already are a teacher in France, you can use your status to work in England no problem, etc...
What do you miss about it Christine ?
I miss Liverpool !
What about a Brit who didn't do French at school, thought he'd finally got it and could answer the phone, chat with French friends and shopkeepers, who then had a stroke and now is back to waiting for his wife to answer the phone, as he has again, no effin French!
He now is even more an atheist!
Lucky none of mine were there then :-D
I'm proud to have invented the Q Code QZZ - My hovercraft is full of eels
Well Kent, I was a sparky in the Merchant Navy and I never stooped so low as to utter those words. More like "please repeat" etc. This was most often used when attempting to communicate with Cullercoats Radio (GCC) on the geordie coast !
By the way do you know the difference between a Merchant Navy R/O and a military or Royal Navy R/O ?
Well, in the RN they are gentlemen trying to be officers and in the MN officers trying to be gentlemen !
Hi Mark. I was mostly the HQ operator and the callsign would have already been said as that would have been a repeat. I guess they preferred pedants on the HQ set to sort out all the cock-ups that used to came through. My regret was that getting very high marks in our radio operator training only meant that you didn't get to go out and play soldiers and get mucky in the field, charging about in armoured cars, pretending to annihilate each other.
It's probably all different now but, at least, I still remember my phonetic alphabet, and that's useful to get pedantic about. Ha ha!
Kent, you did not include your callsign so "Hello unknown station this is zero say again, over"
This could get repetative, ha ha.
Hi Peter. That would also be ex-military radio operators, eg: "Hello one three alpha, say again, over?" It's standard 'radio speak' for when you've not heard or understood properly.
Veronique- one of the most impressive things I have ever seen was during Atlantic Nato exercises in I think 1962. A line astern of five Second World War destroyers (me on Virago) doing a scheduled broadside practice on a target. It was better than the movies!
Frankly I don't think I have got the guts to do it- not that I want to do it (certainly at the moment). I can't help feeling that there's much more of it about then one imagines. In our village, and nearby villages here, it seems pretty regular. Loneliness, real or imagined, seems to be a factor. A local guy I knew, and who was always very friendly, did it two weeks ago. Back in the UK two doctors I knew did it, also an architect, a deep sea diver and a pretty wealthy property investor. I intervened in attempts twice, once in Italy and once in London. In certain people one sort of observes an aura of fate inviting early death and then it happens but not by suicide. One can only imagine the dark processes. For me there are always some good and blessed things every day.
You will enjoy the film "Fury" then, a bit gory but stunning special effects & sound so one for the cinema. My friend provided a couple of Sherman tanks for the film, though not the star Easy 8, which, along with the genuine Tiger, came from Bovington Tank Museum.
I remember my ears making an interesting noise for a few hours after a lovely lovely firepower demonstration (I love gadgets & things that make a noise) at Battlesbury Bowl. Night firing as well, gorgeous, there aren't many things as beautiful as tracer (if it isn't coming towards you).