I think you understand... But you don't speak?

Tuesday, September 13th, 2011

The title was said to me by my host mother, Pascale, in the car today. And I find it very fitting.... Because, for the most part if people talk slowly and use the occasional hand gesture, I DO understand. And yet, for some reason, talking is just a million times harder. I don't use the right sentence structure, the right verb tense, the correct form of the verb regarding the subject, I forget or don't know a random word in the middle of a sentence... Seriously, this list could go on and on. That is why I am excited to start French lessons next week because Pascale told me that the majority of the time, we are just going to working on our speaking. And right now, for me, that is the most important thing right now.

1st/2nd/3rd/4th Class: Yep, a quadruple (Sp?) period of art to start of the day! Seriously, for me, art is like a little heaven where I don't really have to speak French and I don't have to worry about not understanding any of the work, because you just draw. I am so glad that I chose art as my option for school! Today, we started out for the first 2 classes drawing people. At first, I was a bit worried because as far as the whole boat thing went, I was seriously lacking when compared to the other art students. But then, I just started the little template for the people, and all of a sudden  Iwas equal to or better than some of the other kids! I was pretty proud. First, we had to draw this basic man face just to get used to using the template they gave us. Then, we used a picture from a magazine of our choosing and drew that person's face. Now, by the end of the 2 hours, I wasn't quite doen with mine, but I am really proud of it and maybe I won't miserably fail in every class (except for English...) after all! But then, the second group of two hours the teachers made us work on the stupid boats again. It wasn't fun, and no one really accoplished much more than we did the other day. Whenever the teacher told us to work, we just kinda did a mini yet horrible sketch of some kiond of boat and then continued talking. It was a really fun class, because all of my friends were saying names of American people or states or whatever in their French accents, and half the time I didn't even understand what they were saying. Then, I would say the name correctly and they would all crack up. Then, they would have me say really hard French wors to say with a lot of those stupid R's (for whatever reason, I can't do the French R very well... I always find myself rolling them instead!) and then they would get to laugh at me and my horrible attempts at the beautiful French language. It was a really fun two hours, to say the least, with hardly any stupid boat drawing at all.

5th Class: So to continue the little day from heaven, I had gym next! Yay, two classes in a row that I could understand! And, when I walked into the class, I was excited to see that the other American from Iowa, Tedde, was also in my class! We were both excited to be able to speak some good quality English, so we paired up for the entire class. We played some stupid handball game, which was easy for Tedde and I but hard for the rest of the class, which once again symbolized how girls here just aren't very athletic. Sad... But it was a good class anyway, because I was able to fill Tedde in with all of the Rotary happenings and such. She had come out really late because she had some problems with her Visa, so she hadn't been to any type of Rotary anything so far! I know understood why even though the other kids in my school said she was here with rotary, I didn't have the slightest clue who she was. But we got along really well, and I was happy to have her in my school. She also is fluent in French, having taken French for all 4 years in high school and actually working really hard at it, so she could talk to everyone normally and help me too.

6th Class: For lunch, I decided to tag along with Tedde since she said she always ate lunch with ehr host sister and her friends. But when I went to go and get my sandwich, the lunch lady couldn't find the sandwich with my matching ticket anywhere! She seriously looked for like minutes, and she couldn't find it. I found that very weird. One of the theacher/dean of students type people was trying to talk to Tedde and I and was asking where I had bought the ticket. Both Tedde and I tried telling her that I had bought my ticket from my art teacher, and it was the legit bags and everything so she wasn't trying to rip us off, and yet there was no sandwich for me! The teacher really couldn't understand us though, even Tedde, but they were nice enough to have the lunch lady go into the kitchen and make me a new sandwich free of charge. Then, we were finally able to join Tedde's sister and friends for lunch! Come to find out after I thought through the situation fully, I had bought a sandwich from the art teacher for our field trip on Friday, where we would be gone the whole day, thus the lunch people had to make people's sandwiches early. I feel really bad, because then I basically got a free lunch because I didn't understand my teacher completely, but it all worked out to be even in the end...

7th Class: Yay, to continue my extremely easy Tuesday, I had English. Yep, Tuesday's are definitely my favorite day of the week! It was the same class, with the same friends, and the same really nice teacher, so that's good. Of course, the teacher wanted to use me as examples so she did. But I really don't mind, considering someday I want to be a teacher as well! It's just hard when they put me on the spot, and I don't actually know the answer to the question she is asking, even though I totally should!

8th Class: Another easy class, because it was back to art I went! But, unfortunately, this class was art history to prep us for our field trip to the art museum on Friday. Other than my 6th Year French teacher, my art teachers are the other teachers that I have a SUPER hard time understanding. So, needless to say, I didn't learn so much about the art, but I did get to see some cool paintings and one of the artists we covered was Andy Warhol, and I definitely knew who he was already (Thank you, Mrs. Lakin...) so I guess I was able to understand a bit...

9th Class: The only hard class of the day: French with the 6th year. I hadn't yet come up with the briilliant idea of seperately studying French by myself in that class yet, so that hour was kinda a waste of my time considering that I just cannot seem to understand this teacher's fast, weird sounding accent. But hopefully in time, the understaning will come...

Well, I guess school is becoming a little bit less new and exciting and more normal for me, because I am definitely writing a lot less. But then again, we I am writing about it 4 days after it actually happened and I had the easiest day ever, there really isn't much to write about!