Fiches d'anglais

Dailleurs, French students have a fun predilection for both
pencil bags and oddly specific / outdated American culture.

Back at home, I have a giant, blue three-ring binder full of French learning materials. While some of it was added while I was in college, most of it is copies and handouts from my high school days. It's one of my most prized possessions not because of the perfect dictation that I have slid in the front cover (I'd never brag about that old thing), but rather because of what a long-term learning tool it has been for me.
A lot of the resources inside are more of compendiums than worksheets: the appropriate idiom to say how you play every sport conceivable, every common French idiom about food (there's quite a few of those), guides on conjugating every kind of verb. Whereas I did read and study those materials as they were given to me, I definitely did not internalize all of the material on the first or even second read-through. Rather, I consulted the binder on occasion, before exams or trips to France or interviews or even just for fun, over the course of years. Songs and passages that meant nothing to me in my first years of learning French seemed really beautiful in my fifth. Idioms about wind surfing I could never remember before my first national exam came out perfectly in conversations six years later. My big binder encapsulates, in a certain way, what an on-going and branching process learning is (which is recognized by teaching trends like spiraling, for instance).
That's one reason why I get so excited about lesson planning. Besides that I love my job (location aside, perhaps), I love imagining the students returning to their cahiers years down the road and re-reading the materials I give them now. Some of them don't even try to read their pumpkin poems or question sheets about traveling to anglophone countries, and those who do struggle to shape their mouths around each sound, much less understand and appreciate the language. And, of course, many of the students will chunk their cahiers and all the sheets I've had them glue inside. (Can we talk about that for a second? Why do the French have their students glue handouts inside their notebooks instead of just using three-ring binders or folders? Why spend all that time??) But others will keep them and, as they continue on their journey of discovering the English language and traveling about, they will occasionally peep back into their notebook and learn something they'd missed the first few times.
It really ups the ante about catching typos in my teaching materials.