At a middle school in Venissieux, an 8th-grade teacher sends thirteen of her most obnoxious students to work with the American teaching assistant. Ten girls – Aurelie, Badra, Christelle, Djenaba, Eve, Feyza, Gaelle, Hafida, Ines, and Jacqueline – and three boys – Lionel, Mohamed and Nicolas – must be divided into four groups subject to the following conditions:

Each group contains a minimum of three and a maximum of four students
Christelle must be in the first group
Every group contains at least one exceptionally talkative student
No group contains more than one boy
Hafida, Eve, Ines, Nicolas and Mohamed are exceptionally talkative students
Hafida and Ines are not in the same group

1. All of the following must be true EXCEPT:

(a) If Hafida and Ines are not in the same group, they will complain about it.
(b) Anyone who attempts to answer a question will be ridiculed by his or her peers.
(c) Hafida will pick a fight with Eve or else Mohammed.
(d) The students will actually learn something during this class.
(e) An English assistant in Venissieux is overly concerned about the LSAT.

It’s been a month and a half since I came to Lyon, and I hope it’s now safe to say that the hardest part is behind me.  After all, I have a remarkably rosy memory of my six-month Parisian séjour, but must force myself to recall just how difficult that first month was there as well.  Bref, this adjustment blues is nothing new, and it will pass. 

If nothing else, month one was eventful.  I arrived in France sans friends ni housing, and somehow have managed to find some of both since then –  though admittedly, both are still somewhat tenuous.  After my first weekend with our Croix Rousse hosts, a friend-of-a-parent-of-a-friend offered me a room in her house just north of Lyon’s famous Parc de la Tete D’Or, for either a few days or my entire stay.  A suburban homestay was not really what I had in mind when envisaging this Lyon chapter, but with such a welcoming and friendly host (and easy enough bus access) I’m willing to put a damper on my nightlife for now, in exchange for low rent and interesting company!

Then work began, and I finally experienced the infamous banlieue of Venissieux firsthand.  Allow me to say, for now, at least, that it’s not quite as bad as I had been led to believe.  My students – who tend to slip and call me “Madame,” even in English – are good kids, for the most part, many of whom have troubled home lives but bristle at the “défavorisé” label. Some classes have gone better than others – occasionally when using identical lesson plans – but one or two 9/11 “jokes” and anti-American comments aside, I’ve been faring reasonably well, and the curiosity factor (an Americaine in Venissieux? ) has yet to wear off with most of the students.  We’ve talked about Boston, the US in general, Halloween, and even Veterans Day, but the subject that has most captured their interest is the fate of Barack Obama.  As one student volunteered, “he’s a Muslim like us” – and while their grasp on the issues at stake is about as firmly rooted in the truth as that comment, it’s still safe to say that Obama has dramatically altered the way that my country is viewed abroad, even in a setting such as this.

Nearly three months after receiving my arrêté de nomination – that magic sheet of paper giving me the French Ministère de l’Éducation Nationale’s stamp of approval to work in France – I was off to Vénissieux, an innocent-enough sounding town that has inspired more emotional turmoil over these past few months than I ever could have imagined.

First, terror.  My arrêté arrived while I was in Montréal on vacation, so my father opened it and read it over the phone without the benefit of Google maps to help put this new name into context.  Vénissieux? It certainly didn’t sound like anything I’d read about in my obsessive Lyon-area research, which lead to my first fear: that I had been placed as far from Lyon as one could possibly be while remaining in the académie that bears its name.

Next came elation when I was informed that the Lyon metro stretched all the way down to a station called “Gare de Vénissieux.”  This wasn’t quite centre-ville, but seemed like the next best thing! Metro access insured the ability to live in Lyon proper, my main goal throughout this process, and all in all it seemed like a wonderful placement.

But when I began to share my good fortune with friends familiar with the area, I started to realize what I was getting myself into.  The reactions were always the same – eyes lit up upon hearing that I would be in the academie de Lyon, followed by visible cringes upon hearing the name Vénissieux.  « Un peu difficile, » « une des banlieues parfois à problèmes, » « moyen, » followed by «  bon courage, » and, in one memorable instance, « those kids will eat you alive ! »  Vénissieux, I soon learned, was a banlieue in the true sense of the word, a city of recent immigrants and HLMs, the notorious low-income housing projects relegated to all of France’s major cities’ outskirts.  In short, it is known to be disadvantaged, depressing, and even dangerous, and my two assigned collèges had each been designated « zones d’éducation prioritaire, » putting them on the list of France’s most troubled public schools.

Boarding the metro from Croix-Rousse on my first Monday in the city gave me plenty of time to mull this over en route to my first meeting with the faculty.  Three metro lines later, I found myself at the infamous Gare de Vénissieux, and after a short bus ride, I arrived at collège number one of the morning, surrounded by its prison-like fences.   Security personnel unlocked the gates and allowed me to enter, and I began my tour.  A mountain of paperwork later, I was sent back through the gates, and caught another series of buses to the second collège where I would be spending the remaining half of my time each week. This school’s decor was less “prison” and more “construction site,” but at least the interior was slighly more welcoming.

Teachers at both schools explained that these were challenging surroundings with children who were often far behind many of their peers in other parts of the country, despite France’s uniform national curriculum.  My teaching commitments would not begin for several days, however, which left time to shift focus to my more critical task: finding a place to live.

My journey across the Atlantic was uneventful, if sleep-deprived, but shortly after boarding the Lyon-bound plane in Amsterdam, the doubts and fears came rushing back, and I began to consider all that I had given up in pursuit of my “grande adventure.”  I knew Lyon by reputation only, and would be arriving friendless, and, in essence, homeless.  It was all I could do to keep from crying on the plane, and I kept reminding myself of all the reasons why I had decided to return to France. From the safety of my Boston cubicle at my “real job,” all of these reasons had seemed compelling, but with the journey underway, my rationale seemed laughably naïve.

I arrived in Lyon, struggled with my luggage, found a phone card, and called my host for the weekend, a French law student who was hosting another assistante d’anglais and had volunteered to do the same for me.  I was the first to arrive, and Pauline had graciously offered to meet me at the train station and bring me back to her apartment, which was an immense relief given how extensively I’d seemed to overpack.  Still, the bus ride from the airport to the train station, through perhaps the least-picturesque areas of the region, did little to lift my spirits, and I began to worry that I’d made a huge mistake.

But the fears subsided when I met my host, Pauline, who helped me with my bags and guided me through the Lyonnais metro in my sleep-deprived fog. We arrived chez elle, at the Place de la Croix-Rousse, and several moments later I was sound asleep on her couch.

Later that afternoon, we attended to the most pressing administrative task of my arrival – reactivating my French cell phone – and then proceeded to wander down the steep and narrow streets winding their way to the Hotel de Ville.  Finally, things were beginning to look a bit more like I had expected : typically French, with nineteenth-century buildings, cobblestone streets, and architecturally extravagant buildings that were hardly noteworthy to anyone actually living here.  I caught the occasional glimpse of Paris, but the surroundings more often served as a reminder that I was in a very different city.

Our wanderings ultimately led us back to la Part Dieu, the depressingly-located train and bus station where I had arrived several hours earlier.  Pauline’s boyfriend Camille met us there, and together we found the other assistant who had arranged our stay chez eux.  We hopped onto the Metro, returned to la Croix-Rousse, and prepared for a hilariously surreal evening with our hosts and their friends.  Who knew that staying awake until 2am on the night you arrive would be such an effective jet lag-fighting strategy?

It’s official: tomorrow I fly to France to begin my adventure as an ‘assistante d’anglais’ in Lyon, and and I could not have a more appropriate song stuck in my head than Aldebert’s La rentrée des classes

Sur le lit étalé en patchwork
L’essentiel de ma garde robe, bien !
Tout est lavé, essoré, séché, repassé
Me voilà prêt pour le jour J du lendemain
En finissant d’boucler mes bagages
Mon stylo quatre couleurs mon taille-crayons mappemonde
Je calcule sur une Texas Instruments
Combien font 24h en secondes
Mais non j’ai pas peur !

…well actually, that last line is a lie. I’m terrified, excited, anxious, usw. Housing? Stay tuned. Teaching middle schoolers in a banlieue ‘un peu difficile’? Equally foreign.  And life post-France? Entirely up in the air. But it’s far too late for second guessing, and I’m enough of a Francophile to know that I’ll have a great 7 months regardless…donc je vais prendre mon courage à deux mains and hope for the best!