Courses

It was requested that I write more about classes, and since your wishes are my command, since they give me topics to type about when I’m at a loss, here ya go. Hope this answers any questions there might be. My main class is grammar. That meets three times a week for 1 hour and 50 minutes each time. Each level has a different grammar class and teacher and such. For example, Level 30s have grammar and technique with the same group of 15 people and it’s only level 30 students. Each teacher runs their grammar class as they see fit. Since I started in one level and switched to another, it’s interesting to see the differences. I really like my teacher right now. She tries to teach grammar through just reading newspaper articles and then talking about them or watching a movie in french and talking about the grammar stuff. When you’re giving a presentation for the class and you make a mistake she gets really excited and uses it as an opportunity to teach everyone the right way to do it. Shes’ really laid back about it and thing’s really a big deal. The other morning class is techniques. That’s just once a week, also for an hour an 50 minutes. This is a different teacher than grammar and the whole class is pretty much about writing. We write an essay for homework each week and we have one pretty formal presentation to give, and the rest of the time we learn about how to improve our reading comprehension and take good notes. I really like this teacher too… she’s a little harder but she totally rips on people who think they’re the bomb which makes me evily smile. Electives are held just once a week in the afternoon. There’s a schedule of all my classes in a previous entry, so look back on that for when they are and stuff. Literature is pretty interesting, just like a litterature class in the States. An hour and a half lecture style class. Lots more kids in this class because it’s open to anyone in 30-35. Read excerpts or a whole book for homework and look at some questions. Then in class he discusses the questions. This prof is actually pretty interesting and Tiffany and I saw him in the bookstore while we were picking out books the other day. Hopefully this will result in an automatic A. lol La France et l’Europe is a politics and economics class. Hour and a half as well but the prof is awful. He’s not originally French and he has a speech impediment so it’s really really hard to understand him and he doesn’t really teach. He just reads off the overhead, which is a copy of the page in our book, but then he gets really off-topic and goes into completely unrelated, uninteresting stuff. History of Art is just an hour and a half of looking and learning about art. Pretty basic. The prof is hilarious, mainly because her stick figure recreations of everything are incredibly entertaining. Translation… this class is two hours and it’s incredibly tedious. The whole thing is just translating sentences and phrases between English and French. Seeing the differences, learning how to decide which term to use, how to change grammatical structure between the two languages. The prof is really really soft-spoken and she can drag even the most interesting topic out until you feel like you’re being beaten with it. And then there’s Film. 3 hours. Oh dear Lord. The first 2 hours you just sit there watching a movie. In French, so you can only really understand about 1/3 of the dialogue and we’re starting with old movies which have really bad sound quality anyway. So you try incredibly hard to stay awake through the movie (I find a candy bar and a large bottle of water consumed at regular intervals helps) and then you have to struggle to stay awake as the prof goes over the important symbolism of the movies for an hour. He just sits in front of the microphone in the front and monotones the entire thing in his French-White Barry White voice. It’s awful. That class is huge too, at least 130 people I’d say. So those are my classes! Hope classes for all of my school-going readers are going well!! Keep up the comments, I love getting them.