Three days before the students, the teachers make their return Friday. They will discover their schedule for those who have not yet, and find their colleagues before their students on Monday. But this comeback is particularly peculiar for teachers in first class who are suffering the plaster of the reform of high school.
Between the new subjects in the program and the new baccalaureate, some teachers had to work all summer to prepare their return. "A pupil has 12 hours of specialty teaching in his schedule, twelve hours on which you have three courses of specialties that vary", explains to Europe 1 Gerard Heinz, headmaster in the Rhone and representing SNPDEN in the academy of Lyon. "Each student can have a combination of three specialty courses that are different from his classmate, which creates enormous complexity, a real Chinese puzzle.We worked almost non-stop on the schedules between the first half of July and the end of August. "
After a summer start marked by the strike of the correctors of the baccalaureate, this comeback looks harder for teachers who have not really had time to breathe. "On an emotional level, the colleagues who were forced to deal with this terrible situation and who went on with the design of the schedules did not have a good summer, I can tell you ..." Heinz.
The vagueness around new specialties
Especially since the teaching of new specialties on the program feeds some apprehensions. Professor of philosophy in Poitiers, Stéphane Marcireau will be able to teach his subject from the first class this year, with the new specialty "Humanities, literature and philosophy". This is to have students study the texts of great authors, such as Corneille, La Fontaine or Shakespeare. The French teacher has to deal with the literary aspects, and he has philosophical questions. But Stéphane Marcireau is afraid of drying up if the students' questions are outside the scope of his traditional philosophy course. "If they have very specific questions about a certain character in the text or the context of the literary work, then I would have to send them back to the professor of literature," he admits. "It's not always very comfortable for a teacher to recognize his limits, even if it's human - you can not know everything."
Another novelty: the specialty "History-geography, geopolitics and political science". Some teachers feel they have been on their own to prepare for the course over the past two months, and many have had to share social media. "I do not know exactly what is expected of me.There are some benchmarks, but it remains relatively vague," says a teacher who would have wished to exchange with an inspector of academy during the summer. Each of these new subjects will lead to a test in January, which will already count for the Bac. And again, teachers are not sure what it will look like.