I've been teaching the numbers one to 30 since October. But such is the price to pay for spending a year in the city of your dreams – the job of your nightmares.

Having been hellbent on being allocated a placement in Paris, I did not specify a preference for what age group I would like to teach, and was graciously left to the mercy of nearly 200 tiny French children, ranging from seven to 10 years old.

And before you start with the old "ach, they're only kids" line, I must stress that I am most definitely not of the maternal persuasion and therefore cannot excuse their deliberate and calculated misbehaviour as childhood folly.

They're much cleverer than you think. To begin with, I took my daily barrage of Hellos yelled in comedy voices with good grace. Nearly four months on, I can barely manage a grimace as I am chased up the corridor by these infuriating salutations. Just as I was beginning to think I was getting wound up over nothing, one teacher chastised his class for mocking me – one does not scream bonjour numerous times as a greeting, although I have seriously considered it in retaliation.

That does not however compare to the major feat of endurance that is trying to capture and maintain their attention.
Since arriving, I have been continually astounded by French children's obsession with matters of the stationery kind. Common questions concern whether one should write on a large or small page, with lines or without and should it be turned horizontally or vertically.
Other blood pressure risers include the inevitable fork in the road: 'pencil or pen?', a penchant for meandering aimlessly about the room during the class and an absolute fixation with putting things in the bin.


The only logical explanation for this phenomenon that I can think of is that it is a natural adaptation of qualities required in a country so bogged down in bureaucracy; both for survival and a possibly future career spent wrapping people in red tape. Even the simplest of activities requires overly complicated and convoluted instruction, and this is not helped by the fact that the provided workbook contains no text whatsoever, only pictures of daft characters and a suspicious-looking sheep.

My relationship with the teaching staff is equally as frustrating. I appear to be regarded as something similar to flat-pack furniture: cheap, does the job and aside from initial construction, can be left to own devices without much attention.

However in my experience, you get what you pay for. Following the advice of everyone who knows how seriously I like to take things, I have made a conscious decision not to be wound up by the superior Parisian attitude when they spot that you've made a mistake in your painstakingly typed vocabulary handout. After all, these are people who spend their lunchtimes cracking themselves up over turns of phrases in French that don't sound pretty. Grammatical accuracy isn't enough, seriously.


Luckily, it's not all sniggering and nonsensical questions asked in voices so shrill they're out of my hearing range.
So far I've met a coffee-drinking three-year-old prodigy and my hero: a little boy who, when I can no longer squeeze my exhausted brain for spontaneous examples, scrawls others on blank pieces of paper and holds them aloft from the back of the classroom for me to read.


And, unlike my poor friend in Spain, I don't have to encourage the macabre conversation topics of angst-ridden teenagers because they're the "arty type". Teaching English is a wonderful way of seeing the world, learning new languages and meeting new and ever so strange-but-interesting-people. But don't forget to swot up on your grammar, because every silver lining has a pluperfect, imperfect, present participle and irregularly conjugated cloud. But as they say, your school days are the best days of your life – this time round, they may have a point.