Conseil de Classe

written 9/30
Today was the conseil de classe for my school, which is basically a meeting with all professeurs and administration to discuss the schedule and program for the year. My school is really small, so there were only 8 of us in attendance; the 4 professeurs, the director/5th prof, the econome/surveillant, the president of the APE and the secretary of the APE. The director is the principal, the econome is in charge of all things financial and the surveillant is in charge of discipline. The APE is the parents’ association, but I think it might be better compared to the school board than the PTA. They seem to have quite a bit of power and access to money for the school.
The meeting started with general information and the presentation of me! I hadn’t met one of the professeurs yet, and hadn’t seen the other two since my visit earlier this summer. We then discussed the schedule for the school year, basically what days we are going to end class for each trimester. We also decided who was going to be Professeur Principal for each class. The PP is the prof in charge of calculating the grades for the class. Yes, each prof decides for the grade for the class they teach, but in the BF system all the grades are then averaged to find the student’s Moyen (literally, mean/average, which is used at the end of the year to determine if the student passes for the year). This is no easy task because they don’t have computers at the school here, so it is all done by hand. (I do plan on making an Excel program and sharing it with my fellow teachers). Because of how much work this entails, they do fight over who has to take the bigger classes, this year the director took the biggest class, 5th, which is 109 students.
The next issue on the table was in fact class sizes. I forget if I’ve mentioned this before, but my school is a college, meaning middle school, which has 4 grade levels, 6th, 5th, 4th, and 3rd. This year my school has two 6th grade classes, each at 90, one 5th at 109, 4th has 60 and 3rd has 41. You’ll notice that our retention rate is not that great. But this is also only the 6th year the school has been around, meaning the 3rd grade class is only the 3rd class to start here. A big concern for the school right now is the size of the 6th grade classes and the fact that next year, we are not going to have room for that many in 5th. So, we need to add another 5th grade class. Well, we currently don’t have a room for another class. We also don’t have enough professeurs for another class. We don’t have enough professeurs for the number of classes as it is! As we were discusses this, the director directed his concern for needing another classroom at the president of the APE, asking him if they can have one built by next year. The president seemed to think it was possible, but that still leaves the question of finding at least one more prof… I also know that the village next to ours is currently building a school, so maybe more of our students will go there, but I don’t think we can count on that. Nor do we want tp, it’s a good thing that the schools growing, it means that more students are continuing with school!
We finished the meeting with any personal requests for supplies or possible schedule changes, as well as a request to the APE to get some of the student desks fixed.
After the meeting we all went to the president’s house for some cold beers and delicious chicken! School started Friday, but I don’t have classes Friday, so I start Monday! I realized too late that because it’s hard to get to my village on Sundays, it would have been better to get Monday off than Friday (if I want to go to the capital for the weekend or something). But we’ll see how this goes and if it’s a huge issue I might ask to switch next trimester. It affects everyone else’s schedule though, so I’m kind of kicking myself for forgetting to ask earlier, or rather for asking for the wrong day off…
I have to admit, I am really ready for school to start! This last week, the amount of free time I have here was really getting to me. This past month I’ve felt a little directionless, and while that was nice at first, I’m glad to start feeling like I’m actually doing something here.