Only a few hours before the children return to school. To prepare for the start of the school year, the teachers are active and, even if he recognizes that several measures included in the protocol provided by the Ministry of National Education are disconnected from the field, Antoine Papillon, a teacher in a school north of Nantes, is eager to find his students, he explains at the microphone of Europe 1. 

INTERVIEW

Before several hundreds of thousands of students return to school in the coming days as part of the deconfinement, thousands of teachers will make their pre-school on Monday, May 11. In schools reshaped by the coronavirus crisis, we will have to adapt with very strict sanitary conditions. If some have doubts about the merits of this return to school, others are eager to find their students, like Antoine Papillon. "I don't see why it should go wrong. On the contrary, I'm in a hurry to see my students again," explains this teacher at the microphone of Europe 1.

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The reception of caregivers' children during confinement went "very well"

Antoine Papillon knows the class of coronavirus ambiance. For several weeks, he has welcomed children from caregivers at the Émile Gibier school in Orvault, near Nantes. He therefore approaches back to school calmly. "It allowed us to see the barrier gestures and how we could organize ourselves with four or five students," said the young 24-year-old teacher, who said that this particular period "went very well".

This week, however, he will have 16 students. To prepare for it, he potashed the thick protocol of the Ministry of National Education. Going through the 63 pages, he found instructions which, according to him, correspond mainly to "common sense", even if for some of them, a gap remains between theory and practice.

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A protocol established by "people who are not on the ground"

"It came out of people who are not on the ground," he regrets, and necessarily, the match between words and actions is difficult to obtain. "For example, on the protocol, it is written that one cannot correct a pupil's notebook without having left it aside 24 hours", underlines Antoine Papillon.

So that the pupils could have a correction of their exercises, it was decided in his school that "the pupils were going to correct themselves together". "These are things that we approach as a team and we think differently," says the teacher. 

"If we are terrified and show it to the students, they will take it"

Adaptation will therefore be the watchword of this particular start of the school year, which can cause anxiety for some teachers. The young man is not deaf to this fear, but keeps his optimism. "Of course, I hear the stress," he admits. "But if we are terrorized and we show it to the students, they will take it," warns Antoine Papillon, who intends to explain the situation to the children and reassure them. 

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They too will find their school turned upside down by the coronavirus. Usually 24 in their CM1-CM2 double level class, there will only be 16 at the start of the school year.