French Schools, Take 2

I have even more pictures for you that I took at one of my schools.  They're to give you a better idea of what the inside of a French elementary school looks like, because I find them totally different from American ones.

Stairwell--not doing a good job of illustrating the great differences...

View from the school--look at all that mistletoe!

Mural painted on the side of the school--pretty awesome :)

Girls' bathrooms; there's no main door, but there's not even stalls in the boy's bathroom.  You can literally walk past and see your own students peeing.  Weeeiiirrrddd :|

Teacher's lounge--there's the radiator on which we balanced the plate o' cheese :)

Teacher's lounge fridge--we must be in France, huh?

View from the upstairs hallway

 There's something very different about the feel of the classrooms, too.  For instance, none of the walls are white--each classroom is painted entirely one pastel color, depending on the grade of the students in that room.  When you first walk into the room, there's a giant set of stairs leading up to the blackboard--they run the length of the blackboard, and it's almost like a soapbox for you to stand on and deliver your opinionated speeches-slash-English lessons.  There's no real teacher's desk, and if there is, its' often pushed right up against students' desks, so you can stare each other down while you work.  There's a "French alphabet," which is exactly the same as the American alphabet, except the letters are way fancier.  So fancy, in fact, that in some of the younger classes, the students can't recognize your less-fancy letters as "letters" at all--they literally can't read your handwriting because to them it looks like another language.  Perhaps most bizarrely, there are no world maps.  Maybe that's why French 5th graders still have a hard time realizing that Tennessee is not a department in France...