Sharp Edges and Fiddly Bits

Last week, I had the honor of giving an address at Upper School Awards Evening. I talked about my experience as a Saint Michael's student: finding a home there, going out into the wide world, and coming back as a teacher. In my effort to convey the uniqueness of the Saint Michael's experience, my metaphors meandered through fishponds and geometric objects, and the phrase "sharp edges and fiddly bits" really did occur. Several times. 

Upper School Awards -- May 26, 2011 

It’s been five years, almost to the day, since the last time I stood at a podium to address the Saint Michael’s Upper School student body. It was commencement, and I was delivering the valedictory address. Five years ago, we didn’t have this chapel. I was looking out over my friends and classmates from the lectern at Saint Andrew’s church, but the view from here is almost identical. It seems aptly symbolic of my return to Saint Michael’s: the scenery is different from where I stand now, as a teacher rather than a student, but everything feels wonderfully familiar. 

Those Who Can, Teach

I'm auditing a class this semester called "Education in the USA" and, despite the fact that it's not one of my "real" classes, I probably spend more time thinking about it than even my thesis. It is a thought-provoking class in every way, but one of the best things it has done for me personally is alleviate the persistent guilt I have carried around for years about wanting to be a teacher. We've all heard the maxim "those who can't do, teach" (and those who can't teach, teach P.E.) -- laughingly, but with the understanding that yes, we actually believe it. It has been both implied and explicitly stated throughout my education that my turning around and becoming a teacher would simply be "a waste," and many of my high-achieving friends have received similar messages -- most often, ironically, from our teachers. A professor in France told me point-blank that I should be aspiring to much more. When I was in the process of applying to Teach for America (to which I was not accepted), I felt I had to defend it by driving home the point that it was only for two years, and that if I ever did make teaching a career, I would do something "real" first. While I still think there are advantages to teachers' gaining experiences other than teaching, I am now in a much better position to refute the assumption that teaching is somehow a substandard career choice.

C'est quoi la grève?

First of all, go watch this. (Here's the more-or-less comprehensible Google Translated version.) I heard it referenced many times here before actually hearing it play on the radio. Musical quality? Mediocre at best. But pretty hilarious because, well, so true.

Last semester's blogging was principally preoccupied with food. This semester, if I weren't too lazy to blog, it would all be about la grève. The word "strike" in English just doesn't carry the same weight of cultural connotations that grève seems to here. I can't count how many times since this strike started that people have told me striking is the national sport of the French. I have no trouble believing it. By all accounts, it's striking season - each year the revendications (demands, assertions, "this is what we're striking about") change, but come the third or fourth week of the spring semester and the striking begins. This turned out to be very accurate; most of my classes only met two or three times before being shut down by the strike.

It started, if I remember correctly, in the middle of my literature class - some of the students had held a general assembly that morning, and that afternoon the fire alarm went off during class. I didn't connect the two events until after we'd been shivering outside for half an hour and someone had got up on the steps to make a speech that I didn't entirely comprehend. It clicked when about half the students walked away in the direction of the bus stop rather than back to class, although my professor obstinately went back inside and finished her lecture through the continuing noise of the fire alarm.

It took about a week for all my classes to get shut down by the strike; classes in Letters and Languages went almost immediately, since its students were largely the instigators of the strike, as far as I can tell. Kinder observers will say that the liberal arts students are very socially conscious; most people will just call them anarchists. Whatever the case may be, they're a lot more invested in this than any of the other departments, and it's largely their fault that other faculties got shut down, since Letters and Languages students would go and "occupy" classes in other departments to dissuade them from taking place. In any case, it's been a full month since I've had a normal class week, though one math class obstinately continues to meet, even with only half its students, and the other has had fits and starts of trying to get back off the ground. At various times, both Letters and Languages and Mathematics have officially suspended classes for up to a week at a time, since even the professors had stopped showing up. I guess if they officially cancel classes it makes it administratively easier to make them up later.

At this point you're probably wondering what exactly they're striking about. Yeah, me too. As far as I can discern, there are three main reforms the government is trying to pass that people don't seem happy about. One has to do with the status of professor-researchers, and giving universities more power to evaluate them and establish how much teaching and how much research a given individual does. Another has to do with the way you become a teacher; currently you pass a competitive exam and go through a formation that's independent of the public university system, but the reform would make a teaching degree a master's program like other university degrees. The third has to do with how universities are funded; currently the government pays for pretty much everything and students pay a nominal enrollment fee, but some people want to let universities accept funding from private corporations.

My big questions, when I figured out that these were the issues, were: why are the students striking, when it seems like these reforms principally affect teachers and administrators? And how, as a student, do you even go on strike anyway? The rhetoric is pretty predictable. A lot of words like "solidarity" and "this is our future" and "corruption of the educational system." Everywhere you look are banners that say "university in danger." Here, education is free for students, which means that it's regarded as a right rather than a privilege. It's also extremely standardized, because if it's a right then everyone should have the same rights. Thus the resistance to evaluations of professor-researchers that would differentiate among them, privileging some, and the resistance to private funding, which might mean some universities or areas of study would be privileged over others. Basically, privilege is a dirty word here.

It all comes down to the free education system (which can apparently be traced back to a decision by the Catholic church, according to last semester's history class), which means that on the one hand, the government pays for everything, a system that may or may not be sustainable in the modern world (and especially the current economic climate), leading them to look for alternative sources of funding (though we'd never talk of actually asking the students to pay); and on the other hand, it creates a system where students can go on strike to protest such reforms, an idea that seems laughable to those of us who pay for our education. I would really love to tell a French student how much money I would have lost in the past four weeks if I'd stopped going to classes, just to see their jaw drop. Here, the worst that can happen is that they'd lose this semester, and since they're not paying anyway, it's much less of a big deal than it would be back in the U.S. - they can always repeat. Even so, since the students haven't been going to classes, the professors haven't been giving classes, bringing the university to a grinding halt and obliging it, by law, to make up the missed classes whenever the strike ends. Many of the professors I've talked to don't actually agree with the cessation of classes, even if they're against the reforms, but their position is "if the students don't want to have class, we won't have class." But they'll still make up the missed classes later. It boggles the mind, how docile they are. To all appearances, the students run this university.

We're now into week five and Middlebury has set up some replacement classes and tutorials for us, though in theory we're still supposed to be doing independent work for our "real" classes. Everything is fuzzy; we have no end date for the semester, since it may well be prolonged due to make-up classes; many of us still have no plane ticket home. It's certainly a point of cultural divergence with the American system, and not one I approve of nearly as much as the food...

Trop fatiguée d'inventer un titre intéressant

Highlights of the week: 

• Virtual Xenia dinner on Sunday night (in the wee hours of Monday morning for me), despite being able to actually hear very little and despite having to get up for an early class on Monday...which was cancelled, but I didn't know that until I'd gotten there. I miss Midd professors who email you when they aren't going to show up.
  
• Mysteriously nonexistent bus on Tuesday led me to try walking home from Hôpital de la Milétrie - I arrived about an hour later, by probably the most circuitous route possible. Fortunately, it was a pleasant day for walking.
• Three hours of outlining with my partner for an oral presentation on Balzac and mimesis. French students are every writing teacher's dream: they start by brainstorming, progress to outlines, leave the introduction and conclusion for last, consider revision a mandatory process...it would have been my own personal nightmare in English, but in French the organized method cuts down on comprehension problems. And I'm sure we're going to come out of it with a very good presentation.
• Les Bacchantes for Elizabeth's 21st birthday (a little anticlimactic, seeing as how she could have bought a drink just as easily the day before) and folk dancing, which was excellent. I learned how to dance the mazurka, at least well enough to follow my partner. It's Polish and lovely and counted in 9 beats, and the music is generally melancholy and romantic. I'm a fan.
• Waking up this morning for an 8 a.m. class after a mere 4 hours of sleep, and with a sore throat to boot. I more or less slept through said class, and afterwards braved a French pharmacy to get cough drops. Procuring anything remotely medicinal (up to and including contact solution) requires interacting with a pharmacist - no running into the grocery store to grab a bottle of Advil. On the one hand, they know quite a bit; on the other hand, I don't like being stared at while I decide what I want. Bah.
• Chest x-ray today to confirm that no, in fact, I don't have tuberculosis and it really is okay for me to stay in France for a year. I fail to comprehend the reasoning behind the procedure, since surely a short-stay visa still gives you sufficient time to infect people with TB. Who knows. It was also an object lesson in the casual French attitude towards nudity - in the U.S. they tend to give you a gown if you have to halfway disrobe for an x-ray. Oh, Europeans. On the other hand, I didn't have to wait at all - in fact, there was almost nobody in the hospital. It was faintly creepy. I walked home afterwards by a much more direct route, though it's still a solid 40 minutes. But a sunny 40 minutes, so no complaints.

Now just tomorrow to get through. Plans for the weekend: sleep. Lots of it.

Those who cannot write, translate.

Due to the interesting scheduling habits of the university, all four of my translation classes meet on Monday and Tuesday, which is fine and all except for the part where I have three translations due at the beginning of every week. Ah well. Today we looked at the extract of Toni Morisson's Song of Solomon we had to do over the weekend, and I was pleasantly surprised to find that I'd made a lot of the same choices as the native French speakers in the class. (Today's the day to get a bit of a morale boost before M. Fryd's class tomorrow, in which I will undoubtedly discover that I can't speak or write French.) I spent most of the class period wishing that everyone but the ten or so of us who actually cared would just go away (I haven't seen a teacher have that much trouble keeping a class quiet since the year I read to the kindergarten class every week), but the professor had some interesting insights (including one spot where she'd actually understood the English better than several of us anglophones...that was slightly embarrassing). After class, I checked out a copy of Le chant de Salomon from the university library, and discovered that the translator had rendered most things the same way we had in class; in some cases I even think we did a better job. So, yay for us.

In between classes, I went into town with Elizabeth to attempt to pick up the books we'd ordered for our literature class. First the bookstore was closed over lunch (only on Mondays - I'd understand if it were everyday, but what about Monday particularly necessitates a long lunch break?), and when we returned, the saleswoman told us one of the books was indefinitely unobtainable; no, she didn't really know anything, would we please hurry up and go away. So that was frustrating. In the interim I tried to procure makeup, having had a clumsy moment with my powder that ended with it everywhere except in its container, but a) the color Matte Ivory doesn't exist in France and b) when the saleswoman found another color that would work for me, it was out of stock. Today hasn't been my day for shopping.

My second translation class (French to English) was predictably frustrating, since the professor and I do not speak the same version of the English language. It's doubly frustrating because she will commend all sorts of approximate, even verging on ridiculous, translations from the French students, but she has no problem shooting down reasonable suggestions from the anglophones in the class if they don't match her specific idea. "Approximate" is probably the best way to describe her style of translation. Given that, it's fortunate she doesn't have us tackling canonical French literature the way my other professor is going after serious English/American stuff (Oscar Wilde, Charles Dickens, Garrison Keillor...oh wait). Instead, we've been translating excerpts of murder mysteries and newspaper articles, though I disagree strongly with some of her pronouncements about journalistic style. Can you tell I'm really a fan of this professor? I'd like to poll the audience: is "a pressure cooker ready to explode at any moment" a legitimate metaphor for a tense situation (think riots, racial conflict, etc.)?

I don't mean to give you the wrong impression; despite wanting to engage this professor in argument after every sentence, I think I'm learning a lot from the class, probably exactly because I disagree with her so much. I'm also learning how to keep my mouth shut and carry out these arguments in my head. I'm coming to the conclusion that translation is something I really could enjoy as a career.

In which the author waxes lyrical about etymology

Today was a fairly uneventful day of classes. My hand nearly fell off from taking notes in interpretation, since the entire class consists of writing madly in an attempt to glean every detail from a two-minute discourse in French or English, and then resting your hand while some brave soul has a go at rendering it in the other language. The limit seems to be about six per class, after lots of "um" and "euh" and (finally) explanations by the professors, and since I gave it a shot last week, I won't get to go again for a while. So basically it's a class in note-taking skills. Still, I enjoy it.

My other class today was translation: version (i.e. English to French). Turns out I was the only one to send my translation to the professor ahead of time like he said we could - hurrah for currying favor with vaguely evil professors. There was plenty of red on the paper, but at the bottom it said très bien pour un premier devoir (very good for a first assignment), so I am not without hope of doing well in the class, despite his severity. He knows a lot about etymology* and is extremely good at his subject - several of the translations he proposed made me quite green with envy that I hadn't thought of them. My little red book of conjugations has already come in extremely handy, and today I bought another book called Vocabulaire de l'anglais contemporain, which is actually meant for French people but should also prove very useful. It's comprised entirely of thematic vocabulary lists, with English on the left and French on the right. They're excessively thorough, and two of my translation professors handily reference appropriate sections at the top of the page of text for translation. So hopefully I will soon be up on idiomatic usage and all that jazz.

Tomorrow I have more classes, including the one for which I have to read the amazingly long 16th century travelogue, then Bible study, then my first intentional experience with French nightlife. Several of us are getting together with Jeanne to go to Les Bacchantes (of host-family-dancing fame) to dance to French folk music. Hardcore partying, as you can see. I'm spending the night with Elizabeth, due to my far-away habitation. Thursday morning is the TCF, a national French exam Midd is obliging us to take. We'll take it again at the end of our stay here, so they can reassure themselves that this program actually worth their effort, I suppose. I'm sure staying out late and dancing is an excellent way to prepare for said exam.

Today I talked to a girl who is (I think) a student of my host mother - she's looking for someone to help her with her English, which I think will be fun and indirectly good for my French. She tried to vouvoyer me on the phone though, which was just weird (you use vous ("you") to be polite to people who are older than you or whom you don't know well, but generally young people don't use it with one another). Kind of like the shopkeepers who call me Madame, or back home "ma'am." I'm not old. Stop it.

Apparently it doesn't matter how many days I write about at a time; if you give me space, I will ramble on. I would apologize, but as nobody is obliging you to read this, I suppose it's unnecessary. And now, off to dinner.


*Including English etymology. Today we got the etymology of negation in both French and English. In French, it was originally just ne ("not"), plus whatever appropriate noun you wanted to employ. So il ne marche pas means literally/originally, "he doesn't walk a step." For other situations, you would use other nouns. Only a few got retained and normalized as part of generic negation, so you have ne...point, ne...pas, etc. In English, the word "not" comes from three Old English words (he was explaining this in French and not writing anything down, so I don't know exactly what they are), the first of which sounds like "na" and the last very much like "whit," meaning "not," "least," and "twig." When slurred together, they ended up as "naught" and "not" in modern English. So actually, the phrase "not a bit" or "not a whit" is a holdover from the older expression and is etymologically sort of redundant. Oh, how I love words.

La samba des jours avec toi

Time for another "brief" resume...er, no, that's not actually the word in English...what am I trying to say? Summary. While I wouldn't say my French is improving in leaps and bounds, I'm definitely getting worse at English, for whatever that's worth.

Friday: First day of class for "Religion, pouvoir et société en France: XVI, XVII, XVIII siècle." We spent most of the (three hour) class covering the basics of Christianity, by which our professor actually meant Catholicism. As in, "to be a good Christian, you must believe in the edicts of the Pope and the councils, which are comprised of representatives of all Christian priests." Um, right, about those Protestants and Orthodox churches...Still, he's an interesting lecturer (for which I am excessively grateful, given the length of the class period) and I think it's going to be a really good class. It's also quite comforting to have other Middkids in the room. Also the first class for "Histoire de littérature du Moyen Age," which...isn't as interesting as it sounds, so far. The professor printed out the notes for us, and then pretty much read them aloud for the hour and a half class. At least it won't be much work. Thanks to the foibles of the bus system, I had a few hours after that class finished before any prospect of getting back to Mignaloux would present itself, so I headed into downtown. My jeans have been getting a bit loose, so I figured the obvious solution was to eat more pastries and hence bought an extremely tasty and beautiful strawberry tart, which I consumed in the sun in the Place Charles de Gaulle. Just in case that didn't work, I went to Monoprix and bought a belt.

Saturday: Into town a bit early so I could peruse the market in front of Notre Dame by myself before meeting the rest of the group. This is a serious market. You can (and people obviously do) buy all your groceries for the week there. The dead chickens (with head and feet attached) disturb me, the bread makes me drool, and the flowers are a constant temptation. Fortunately, I know they couldn't survive a day of wandering around with me, so my pocketbook is safe. I did indulge in fresh raspberries and a baguette (I refrained from the amazing and huge donut-shaped loaf of bread). Then I met some other Middkids plus Jeanne, a former Middlebury French T.A. and Poitiers native, and we had a picnic (I tried pâté - and didn't like it at all - but was fairly proud of myself for being brave) before heading off to see a few things for the Journées de Patrimoine, i.e. "all those cool buildings they don't normally open to the public are on view this weekend." The things we visited weren't really what I had in mind, but we did see a pretty nifty little chapel absolutely covered in wood carvings, the inside of a nunnery (disappointingly modern - turns out it's also a retirement home, run by the nuns), and the Baptistère St. Jean, which before it was a baptistry was a Roman villa, and after it stopped being a baptistry was a workshop for a bell-maker who used the baptismal pool for casting. There are some neat frescos on the walls. I thought about striking off on my own after the group disbanded, but I'd had enough walking so instead headed home, where Christelle and I were abandoned by the rest of the family, who had various things to do. We foraged for dinner and ended up making a salad with grapefruit and corn (such obvious things as tomatoes being lacking), and I was told off for not being familiar with Moby (a singer, apparently?). It was really quite a nice evening.

Sunday: Church as usual - it's getting harder to understand the American pastor as I get more acclimated to hearing actual French people speak French. Also, the really weird non-liturgical communion thing is getting old. This coming Saturday night I'm planning on checking out mass at the Catholic church in Mignaloux (never mind that I can't take communion there at all). Afterwards, Christelle and I were supposed to pick up Brenda from the friend's house where she'd stayed the night, but were instead invited to join them for lunch. It turned out to be a whole crowd of British people, two of whom own this gorgeous and huge property that they've turned into a sort of auberge thing, the rest of whom were just down for the weekend (would that I had that much money). They were practically caricatures of themselves, gossiping about the royal family, discussing football, and saying "tremendous" every other word. It was quite charming. The oyster I choked down to be polite was not so charming. Followed by seafood pie, which I also ate (not wanting to be a stupid American is making me very adventurous). At that point one of the British guys started quizzing me on American politics, making it very clear that he was very right-wing, but also much better informed than me, so I mostly made polite, noncommital hem-hemming noises. It was awkward. The afternoon was passed working on my English-to-French translation homework, which was truly evil - obviously chosen for all the descriptive language, whose plethora of English synonyms boil down to three or four French words. And then dinner with my family, which was...seafood casserole, and whole miniature lobster things. Christelle had to crack mine open for me, as I had no clue what I was doing. I nearly chickened out, but I peeled off its little claw-foot-things and ate it mostly without shuddering. But really, I almost had a heart attack when Brenda took the lid off the casserole dish.

Today: I'm starting to get acclimated to this early morning thing, though I wouldn't say I enjoy it per se. I went to second-year translation this morning (my first time, having missed it last week), and it would have been excellent if the students would just stop muttering all the time. I could barely understand the professor or the person reading their translation. My third-year translation class this afternoon was about half the size and therefore didn't have that problem, but my professor drives me a bit nuts. She's English, and we clearly don't speak the same version of the language. I'll translate the French in a way that sounds perfectly natural to an American, and she'll look at me like I have three heads before giving me a brusque "no" and telling the class the only right way to translate it (her way, obviously). It's a pity, because French-to-English is the side of translation I actually want to be able to discuss in depth and talk about nuance and interpretation and such. Oh well. In between my classes (a space of five and a half hours - quite long, but not long enough to make going home worth it), I went to the library (which is dead quiet and full of silent, studious people, quite a contrast to the section of the Midd library I'm used to working on) to read more of my Histoire d'un voyage faict en la terre du Brésil. I probably covered 80 pages in the space of several hours' concentrated reading. So, you know, only 500 more to go. I might make it by the end of the semester. Upon getting home, therefore, I did the responsible thing and watched a James Bond movie. My host family has the complete collection, and I've only ever seen the most recent, so I watched GoldenEye. It was pretty excellent, in a cheesy action movie sort of way. I have a feeling I will be taking further advantage of their DVD collection. Although I had to change the region settings on my laptop in order to watch it, which I'm slightly displeased about as apparently you can only do so five times (which seems quite arbitrary). Oh well.

And now, having caught up with myself, I am going to head to bed. I really want my 1 a.m. to 9 a.m. sleep schedule back.

Histoire d'un voyage faict en la terre de la France

Yesterday was a bit of a red letter day in that I spent more time enjoying myself than not. In other words: hurray.

My first class was called "Littérature et histoire: représentations de l'Amérique." I was hoping it would count for CMP credit (comparative cultures - i.e. other cultures with North America, because clearly we're the only people who count) at Midd, but it turns out the class is based around a book called Histoire d'un voyage faict en la terre du Brésil. The spelling is funny because it was written in the mid-1500s by a guy by the name of Jean de Léry, French Protestant missionary and explorer of the area around present-day Rio de Janeiro, which the French briefly colonized before being routed by the Portuguese. I think it's going to be a really interesting class, though the book is 600 pages of 16th-century French, which isn't hard to decipher, it just doesn't go nearly as quickly as normal French. Even cooler, Jean de Léry had a contemporary named André Thevet who was a Catholic missionary (so even though they were there at the same time, they didn't do much interacting - the Catholics had the island, the Protestants the mainland) who also wrote a book, of which there's a copy of the original printing in the Médiathèque François Mitterand here in Poitiers. So anyway. I'm going to spend a semester learning about cannibals and French missionaries. Fun stuff.

After a rather tasty pizza (which doesn't much resemble American pizza) at the cafeteria, I proceeded to "Théorie des genres et poétiques comparées: la mimèsis," which would have been not at all what I was expecting, except that I had no idea what to expect. Mimesis, for those who (like me) have forgotten all the technical terms they learned in lit class, is "representation or imitation of the real world in art and literature." We mostly read excerpts of Plato and Aristotle and talked about how Plato thinks mimesis is bad (one step further removed from the ideal) and Aristotle thinks it's normal (representation is how we give meaning to the world). It was more philosophy than literature, but quite interesting. We'll see how that goes.

I then ventured into town to look for books for my classes. There's nothing like the Midd bookstore (I actually miss it, even with its exorbitant prices; at least everything is laid out in an orderly fashion), more along the lines of Barnes & Noble crammed into four or five very small floors with amazingly inadequate signage. I did not spend €60 (nearly $90) on the recommended dictionary for my translation classes, going instead with the €20 variety (what's 100,000 words either way? If I need more I'll go to the library). I did purchase Bescherelle: la conjugaison pour tous, which is a magnificent little book that makes my nerdy heart glow. The first section is devoted to 88 tables with paradigms for every possible category of verb. The second section is all about the grammar of the verb, proper usage, etc. The third section is an exhaustive alphabetical list of every French verb in existence, with numbers to refer you to the appropriate paradigm for conjugation. And it's small and red and shiny and the charts are color-coded and I'm pretty much in love. I found the book about Brazil with no problem, but had significantly more issues with the books for my comparative literature class, La Locandiera (Italian) and Minna von Barnhelm (German), both in bilingual French/original editions. One bookstore told me they might be in Monday (our professor swears she ordered them at the beginning of the summer); the other told me they didn't think those editions were still in print. At that point I gave up and decided to go to the library.

Never having used a French library and having no idea how the cataloging system worked, I went straight to the computer to search, and miraculously found both books in the appropriate editions and available in the library I was in (not a given - there are university libraries scattered throughout the city by subject). So I went to a librarian to ask for help finding them, and was redirected to a pile of small yellow forms, told to fill one out for each book I wanted, and present them to the librarians at the long counter labeled magasins (stores). I did so, they went off to search, and came back 10 minutes later with the books I wanted (there was apparently some issue finding La Locandiera). Apparently they do not trust mere readers to navigate a library. I'm curious as to how they decide what goes in magasins and what in the big room full of books I saw through the door to my right. Oh well. I finished La Locandiera today and very much enjoyed it, though having the Italian and French side by side kept getting me sidetracked on suspicious translation choices.

In the evening I went to a Bible study group that Christelle is a member of, called GBU (Groupe Biblique Universitaire), which, as it turns out, is part of the International Fellowship of Evangelical Students, to which InterVarsity Christian Fellowship (the student group at Midd) belongs. Small world. Anyway, it was interesting. The point of the group is to be somewhat more academic than religious, making study of the Bible open to people of any or no faith, so there was no praying or singing or anything like that. Students in the group take turns presenting studies on shortish Bible passages; I wasn't overly impressed with the first one -- I thought everything they said was fairly self-evident -- but it's a good theory and I hope some interesting things will come out of it. If nothing else, I'll learn quite a lot of vocabulary specific to religious stuff.

After the meeting, we ate at one of the University Restaurants (or RestoU's), where we had galettes and crepes and sparkling cider (which, as it turns out, is alcoholic in France -- surprise surprise). There were a lot of jokes told, some of which I got and most of which I didn't. Humor and plays on words will probably be one of the last things I conquer. Still, it was fun, and everyone was very friendly and only a little mocking about having to explain everything twice for the American.

Today was spent trying to make a dent in the letters I owe people, which was only vaguely successful (turns out writing letters takes a long time, which wasn't an issue over the summer when I had lots of time), finishing La Locandiera, going to the post office, and working on one of the three translations I have due next week. I love translation so much. I think I'm spending way more time on it than is strictly necessary to do well in the courses, but whatever, I'm learning and having fun. I was surprised this afternoon when Bruno came home at an uncustomary hour with a friend of Brenda's in tow - he speaks no English, she speaks no French. I got some impromptu practice at interpretation, which was pretty cool. Brenda grew up in Zimbabwe, as did her friend Susan, who now lives in England. Tonight at dinner (which was pretty amazing and ended with chocolate soufflés) they told stories about childhood in Zimbabwe, their high school classmates who died in the army (mandatory conscriptions, such a scary thing), what it's like going back now. I was trying desperately to remember enough from my history of Africa class to put it in perspective, but mostly what I could summon up was that Robert Mugabe was/is pretty much a lunatic (now that I'm reading the Wikipedia article, I remember there were a lot of acronyms involved: ZAPU, ZANU, etc. -- what Susan and Brenda were calling the Bush War we learned about as the Second Chimurenga). It was really weird realizing that I was getting more or less the colonialist side of things (they're civilians, obviously, but still). As far as value judgments were made in our class, it was mostly in favor of Africans rebelling against colonial opression, but when someone tells you their high school classmate was killed by African terrorists, you don't really know what to think. Anyway, dinner conversation was incredibly interesting.

Now I should definitely go to bed, as it's up at 6:45 to get ready for an 8 a.m. history class. 8 a.m.'s suck even more when you have to take a 7:30 bus to get to them.

Small Victories (Requiring a Marathon Post)

It's been nearly a week since I posted - apologies. I have been both busy and tired. I will try to briefly* sum up (I wanted to say resume, but realized that only works in French - apparently the language immersion is working!) what I've been up to.

Thursday: Meeting with M. Paoli to choose courses. That was something of an organizational nightmare. On the one hand, we are much "freer" than French students in our ability to pick and choose what we want to take. On the other hand, the system really isn't designed for that. Practically everything I wanted to take was on Monday or Wednesday. The schedule I came up with doesn't particularly closely resemble the one I'm following this week. Oh well. Afterward we had apéritifs with the group, on the college (buying alcohol for its students? Cultural education, I suppose...). Several of us decided that smoothies were a legitimate alternative to cocktails. The funniest part was listening to other people trying to order a White Russian or a Bloody Mary - pronouncing them in English and not being understood by the waitress. I left early, courtesy of the bus system. Sigh.

Friday: "Cultural orientation" meeting with Viviana, to learn about even more forms to fill out and things to buy, including housing and civil responsability insurance. As it was explained to us, if, in opening your shutters in the morning, you should happen to knock a flowerpot of the windowsill and onto someone's head, civil responsability insurance will pay for their hospital bills. It was a very long and somewhat stress-inducing two hours, but we were recompensed with pretty amazing pastries. Macaroons are not the same thing as they are in the states - they are squashier and far more delicious. That evening we (my host parents, Christelle and I) had dinner at the new house of Magalie and David, friends of my host family who had been staying with us the week before. It was delicious and included homemade tiramisu. Then Christelle abandoned ship to go hang out with her friends, leaving me to be dragged by Brenda, Bruno, Magalie and David to a real live French discothèque, Les Bacchantes. I was already exhausted, so I watched them dance exuberantly to 80s music (which sounds the same in any language, apparently) into the wee hours of the morning (2 a.m., to be exact). It led me to wonder whether my middle school teachers rocked out like that on the weekends...I did in fact see some very good ballroom coexisting with the gyrating on the same tiny dance floor, including lindy hop, a complicated waltz-like thing, and even some two-step. I was, however, grateful to get home and collapse into bed.

Saturday: J'ai fait la grasse matinée -- literally, "the fat morning" -- i.e. I slept in. We did some house cleaning, I read more of La gloire de mon père. In the evening, Christelle invited me to come with her to the house of one of the women who goes to her church, an American ex-pat who's been a French citizen for 20 years now. We played Guitar Hero, for which I have developed a certain fondness, and some trivia game on the Wii, which I did not excel it given that I don't read all that quickly in French and don't know much about French culture/history. Which Christelle went out of her way to choose at every opportunity, in retribution for my beating her at Guitar Hero. Anyway, it was fun.

Sunday: Church turned into church + picnic + dinner/Guitar Hero/Wii tennis at the house of the same friend. I learned to play pétanque, a traditional Provençal game quite similar to Bocce (but with more rules). I'm not very good at it. It's really fun, though, and it's like a scene right out of an old-ish French movie set in the countryside - a group of men gathered around a cluster of boules, gravely discussing the scoring and using all sorts of unlikely implements as impromptu measuring sticks. My language comprehension probably improved in leaps and bounds that day, as that's the largest number of people I've interacted with at any one time. It's getting marginally easier to understand people I don't know.

Monday: First day of classes. I arrived early, as instructed by M. Paoli, to check the bulletin boards, since we'd been assured our classes probably wouldn't meet when and where they were supposed to. Sure enough, I ran into the professor of my first class as she was marking the new time (about fifteen minutes from that moment). Only one other girl and I showed up for the new earlier hour, so she sent us away and told us to come back at the regular time and we'd just have a shorter class. The other girl invited me to go have coffee (so much for stuck up French people, right?), which was nice. The class was not so pleasant. It was basically sentence diagramming, but in French, so I didn't understand any of the terminology. I'd decided to drop it within about fifteen minutes. I was hoping to change to the first-year version, but alas, it doesn't fit with my schedule. I then had a good long time to kill until my next class, so I went into town to open a bank account (turns out I need one if I want to apply for something called the CAF, which reimburses a portion of what you spend on housing - which is a lovely thought), which actually went smoothly. I was a little impressed with myself, since the last time I did anything of the sort, it was in English and my mom did most of the talking. My second class of the day was the thème section of my translation class; in other words, French to English. I ended up in the wrong class for the first fifteen minutes, which was awkward, but eventually made it to the right spot. The professor is British by birth, and rather stuffier and more brusque than any French person I've yet encountered. The focus is more on utility than literary nuance, which isn't what I'd hoped for, but it will still be good practice. It's also weird translating into British English, especially as the professor is quite sure that her answer is the only correct one. In sum: it was a long day.

Today: Second day of classes went much more smoothly. The oral interpretation section of my translation class is going to be great - the professors (one French, one American) are really nice and there's no lecture, just lots of practice. Today there were no grades being given, so in a completely uncharacteristic move I volunteered to go first and translate a short introduction, given in English by the American professor, into French. I was shaking like a leaf, but I think it went passably well. Then we had the version section of the class, English to French. That professor is what I was hoping for in the other class - very interested in literary conventions, given to long speeches about word choice, etc. Only it's translation into the language in which I don't really understand nuance. Too bad. Also, he was very adamant, even threatening, about the sanctity and purity of the French language (not kidding) and how he would dock the most points from our translations for misconjugated French verbs. I'm going out to buy Le Nouveau Bescherelle: l'art de conjuger before the next class so as not to pollute his native tongue with my gross grammatical errors. My third class was in comparative literature, and was a bit of a mess. Nobody had the books, including me, even though the professor swore she'd ordered them at several bookstores in town at the beginning of the summer. There weren't enough presentation slots/subjects to go around, so I don't have one and thus have no idea where my course grade is going to come from. When I asked her, all she said was, "We're a little disorganized in this department. Don't worry about it, everything will work out" (the French equivalent thereof, anyway). So we'll see.

Now it's dinnertime, and a rather tasty odor is emanating from the kitchen, so I will bid you adieu, faithful readers.

*So yeah, about that being brief...if you made it this far, you deserve a medal. Thanks for your attention!

Vignettes

I'm very thankful today is Sunday: nothing on the schedule that requires doing battle with the bus system. I went to church with my host mother this morning. It was...different. It's called the Église chrétienne (Christian Church), and is exactly what I expected from the name: not actually in a church, praise and worship music, about as non-liturgical as it gets. Lots of spontaneous praying and hand waving. The pastor is American and speaks French worse than I do. All he did was give a sermon; he didn't even serve or particularly bless the communion; you go up and take it "as the spirit moves you," I guess you could say. Me, I like the ceremony and tradition of liturgical churches. But living in Mignaloux, with no buses on Sunday, I'm not sure what other options I have. We'll see.

Mignaloux does have its plus side, being small and cute. Today there was a big market thing, basically an all-town garage sale (it reminded me strongly of the Kolache Festival, sans kolaches, and with sausage in a baguette rather than on a stick). I saw lots of interesting stuff, including an amazing number of matched sets of beer glasses, piles and piles of the little china figurines that come out of King Cake, Readers Digest condensed classics in French, and tons of vinyls, which Bruno collects (he came home with Johnny Cash and Sting, among others). It was pretty fun. However, it greatly disturbed me that they planned on selling the rabbits at the petting zoo for eating. That's just wrong.

To backtrack a bit, we tried to register at the Scolarité des Sciences on Friday and had all sorts of trouble with our American health insurance not being accepted. The nicest of the ladies told Lauren and me to go to our class anyway and we'd get it worked out later, so we did...and we're not going back. I came to that conclusion more quickly, having understood less of the computer science related material than her, but it's not what either of us was looking for. So I'm ditching math for the semester, which leaves this week pretty much free.

We did two walking tours of the downtown area, one Friday afternoon and another Saturday morning, with M. Fabrice Vigier, a history professor at the university. We saw a lot of churches, including some that have been repurposed. It was all quite interesting, and also damp - it's rained every day so far, and the forecast predicts rain for the foreseeable future. Charming. Tomorrow I'm planning to go into town in the afternoon, when there's at least a chance at sun and I am nearly certain the buses are running to/from Mignaloux, to explore inside a few of the churches at my leisure. I love old churches, and devoutly wish people still habitually built in stone. Though it's awful to see the graffiti and ugly paint and electric lights and other indignities people inflict on beautiful old churches. Progress is all well and good, but it should stay away from certain arenas.

I finally bought a cell phone, which is pretty cute and weighs almost nothing, being as basic as it gets (which is exactly my cup of tea). I had to go with the cards to add minutes, because you can't sign up for a month plan without a French bank account - a credit card doesn't cut it. Minutes are kind of ridiculously expensive, as previously noted, but all received calls are free and work even if you don't have any credit to make calls, and emergency numbers are free as well, so it's good for being reachable and in case of emergency.

In general, I'm getting a bit more settled in, though everything is inordinately tiring, including talking to people. I can understand French if one person is speaking in a relatively quite environment, but start adding people to the conversation and I completely lose it. Hopefully that will get better quickly.

L'épuisement

Today was exhausting. Don't ask me what I'm doing blogging about it instead of sleeping; I wouldn't have a good answer. It's a relief to write in English again - we signed the Language Pledge today, so no more cheating by speaking English with my host mother, but communication with friends and family is sort of exempt, so I'm filing blogging in that category. As the day wore on, my French got worse, not better - when I'm tired, I lose all grasp of syntax, grammar, vocabulary (I forgot the word for "dog" this afternoon), pretty much everything you need to communicate effectively. Oh well.

This morning we met with Viviana and M. Paoli for introductions, lectures about French university life, classes, professors, all the logistics. We had lunch at a RestoU, but I haven't really been hungry since I got here (between the walking, the worrying, and the lack of appetite, I'm going to lose weight instead of gain it), so I can't really report on the quality of the food. The afternoon was more lectures and then, for three of us, meetings with professors in the math and science departments. It seems that math professors are the same everywhere - quiet, awkward, hard to engage in conversation - and I felt that he underestimated Lauren's and my level of proficiency. We're both taking Combinatoire (combinatorics) this semester, which is a third-semester course, and for next semester I had to talk him out of wanting me to take courses I've already covered. As it is he barely agreed to let me into a fourth-semester course in Euclidian/Hermitian spaces that I think I'm quite well-prepared to take. Oh well. Lauren and I present ourselves at the Université at 8h30 tomorrow morning to register for our math class, and the class itself starts at 10h30 and goes till 12h30. We'll grab something to eat and take the bus to centre ville to meet M. Fabrice Vigier, a history professor, who's taking our group on a walking tour of Poitiers. Then I'm going to take the bus home and go to sleep.

Speaking of buses, so far I haven't gotten too lost. I almost took the wrong bus this morning, but la conductrice fortunately asked me where I was going (I guess I do look like a foreigner) so it all ended up all right. Living in Mignaloux (a suburb of Poitiers) puts me closer to the campus that most people, but it's a bit of a hassle with the bus system. The routes end early in the evening (we ate dinner in centre ville tonight, so my host mother kindly came and picked me up from the closest bus stop to Mignaloux that I could get to) and you have to call ahead of time to get a bus on Saturday. They don't appear to exist on Sunday at all. I'm thinking of buying a bike, as it's not too far to the Parcobus Champlain stop (though a bit far for walking) where buses run much later and more frequently. We'll see.

I'm pretty nervous about my first class tomorrow, but at least Lauren and I will be together. I'm looking forward to settling into a schedule, at least; hopefully one that permits more sleep than I'm currently getting. I still need to buy a cell phone. I feel slightly naked without one, but they're so expensive here! If you use the pay-as-you-go variety, it's about €40 for the phone, and then €30 for two hours of call time (which comes out to about $0.75 a minute). I'm trying to decide if a one-year plan is worth it. Hopefully I'll have some time to figure that out on Saturday. And now I'm going to bed.

Study Abroad

Hello, long-forsaken readers (should any of you still exist). In the next few weeks, I will be resurrecting this blog in order to chronicle my year in Poitiers. I leave Houston on September 1, stop briefly in Dallas (because that makes a great deal of sense) and arrive in Paris at Charles de Gaulle on the morning of September 2. At that point, I will meet up with a fellow intrepid study abroad student and take the train to Poitiers, arriving at approximately 16h10 (that's 4:10 p.m. to Americans), at which time I will hopefully be met by one or more of my host family (who, by the way, sound amazing). Orientation commences at 10h on September 4, so I will have a day to adjust to the time difference, unpack and hopefully explore the city a bit. I will be living here:

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with Brenda Marshall and Bruno Jorigné, as well as several of their children (including a daughter my age). I am enrolled in the Université de Poitiers, and will be taking classes in French language, literature, history and culture, as well as some math, if I can manage it.

I'm generally very excited, although I still have a longish list of things to do before I leave and there seem to be a daunting number of things to accomplish in my first week there (not to mention a daunting amount of money to be spent in doing them). I will try to post regularly, but I make no promises as hopefully I will be busy. Also, I may or may not write my posts in French once I get there, but if I do I'll be sure to run them through Google Translate for your amusement and (limited) comprehension.

As a final note, my mailing address in Poitiers will be:

Hallie Gammon
Chez Mme Marshall
2 allée des Aubépines
86550 Mignaloux-Beauvoir Poitiers
France

À bientôt!

Dear Math

This abusive relationship needs to stop. For all the time I devote to you, I'm not getting the love and respect I deserve. We've been going steady for a while now - it's time to stop playing hard to get. I can't hold this relationship together by myself. I need some positive feedback from you. You've got me on an emotional roller coaster. Most days I just don't understand you at all; you keep me up at night trying to figure you out. I'm tired of crying over you. I want to quit you, but every time I'm ready to walk away, you remind me how interesting and beautiful you are. I remember how great life is when we're getting along, the exhilaration I feel when I discover something new about you. I want it to work between us, but I can't do it alone. Enough with the enigmas - open up and let me know you love me back!

Love and confusion,
Hallie

This Is Why I Love Math

Today in calculus, my professor was scribbling definitions and examples on the board in full flow when he hit the end of the board. He jokingly suggested that for his birthday, he wanted a round room with a neverending chalkboard. Somebody in the class called out to ask him when his birthday is. It's sometime in October, but I don't think anybody in the class remembers the date because we were all too busy trying to work how old he'll be. His age will be a product of primes for the third consecutive year, and this is the first time in his life that this has occurred. I love how he already had that worked out and didn't even have to think about it. So, how old will Professor Schmitt be?

Nepotism in Action

My parents have been self-employed in the printing and publishing business (The Insite Group) since before I was born, which has meant various things to my family and me over the years. It has its perks, like free printing on anything from birthday invitations to science fair displays, advertising trade accounts with local businesses and restaurants, and the occasional free copy of Adobe Creative Suite. It also means being recruited to help with bulk mailings, sorting archives in the filthy attic, and having a mom who doesn't have time to cook dinner during magazine deadline week. In our photogenic childhoods, my siblings and I would crop up with relative frequency on the cover of Insite. Amusing family stories became fair game for mom's PubDesk column, and even occasionally for the cover story, like the week my family was Amish (in retrospect, I'm not sure why I agreed to that). I've been proofreading and editing magazine stories since high school, but this month is the first time I've gotten to try my hand at writing something of my own (and, even more miraculously, getting paid for it). It's also the first time I've been on the cover since I was about nine. I guess being a college student has its perks too.

Check out this month's issue of Insite - I'm on page 39.

Musings

There's still quite a buzz about the new logo, but it seems to have shifted away from the design itself to the issue of lack of student input in the decision-making process. Now, I am honestly not trying to be condescending or inflammatory or what-have-you, and I certainly welcome anyone's opinion who cares to give it, but this whole thing has had me wondering: exactly how much right do we, as students, have to expect that the administration will consult with us before administrating? Not having experienced any college other than Middlebury, I don't have any authority for anything I'm about to say, but it seems to me that it wouldn't be practical anywhere any larger than Middlebury to try to let students have a hand in decision-making processes unless it was something really major. (Yes, you've guessed it, I don't consider a change of logo really major, but that's more or less beside the point.) One of my best friends goes to Texas State, and it continually surprises me how little she has to do with her school. She lives in a dorm and goes to classes, but she and her friends just don't seem as involved in the school - there are plenty of other things to do around town. Maybe it's another effect of our Midd bubble; there's nothing to do other than get involved. And our size does make us better suited to a more collaborative approach. I'm really of two minds about the whole thing. I think it's great that the administration listens to the student body as much as it does; on the other hand, the adminstration's job is to administrate, and I'm not sure they owe it to us to let us help them do their job. We students seem to feel that we have some inalienable right to be involved in the administrative process, but I'm not convinced that's the case. I guess some people might come to Midd for that opportunity, but to be honest that's not something I ever thought about or expected from the college experience. I mean, by all accounts, if we were at university in Europe and tried to get involved in college decisions like this, we'd be laughed at. Big universities don't necessarily even need to care about their students as individuals with opinions - there are plenty more who would be happy to get in. Maybe places like Midd are the way of the future, with education becoming more of a collaborative effort and less of an adult-student hierarchy. Or maybe it's an effect of our generation. I've been reading a lot of magazine articles about Gen Y lately. It's kind of amusing to see myself and my friends generalized like that, but there are some grains of truth. The consensus seems to be that we dislike hierarchy and being told what to do, but value cooperation and getting involved with causes we care about. Oh, and we feel the world does actually owe us something. All those things seem pretty symptomatic of the recent reaction to the logo. Maybe we're misguided and maybe we aren't. I realize I haven't actually concluded anything. If you'd like to conclude something for me, leave a comment.

Do What You Love

Life is full of pithy but overly simplistic bits of advice like the above. How do you know what it is you love? What if you love too many things? I had more than a few crises as I neared the end of my first year of college (I can't believe I've finished a year of college), but I finally made up my mind to double major in French, which was basically a given (and on the practical end of liberal arts), and math, because I really think it's what I love. I realize many people find math unlovable. I loathed it through middle school, was skeptical through pre-calculus, and only really started to appreciate it when I got to calculus. They don't usually teach you the cool stuff, like linear algebra, in high school. Remember chemistry class when your teacher told you the only way to balance chemical reactions was an educated version of guess-and-check? Actually, there's a simple, foolproof method involving matrix reduction that will give you every possible way to balance an equation every time, including some solutions it would be basically impossible to arrive at by the eyeballing method. Nifty. Well, a lot of subjects have cool tricks up their sleeves. How do I know math is what I want to do for the next three years of my life? It was a small clue when my first meeting with my potential adviser turned into an hour-long lecture on the braid group and I didn't get bored. That evolved into my going to office hours on the (legitimate) pretense of getting homework help, but really just so I could sit and listen to the math professors talk. I heard rants ranging from how the sciences are corrupting pure math, to how math in movies is invariably wrong (and how the professors here invariably know the people hired to be math consultants in said movies), interspersed with mini-lectures about arcane principles of mathematics. As terrifically nerdy as it sounds, those were some of the best conversations I had all semester, and those are the people I want to spend the next three years learning from. I will leave you with a joke that, even if you never find mathematics lovable, you have to admit is pretty hilarious:

Q: What do you get if you cross a mosquito with an elephant?
A: (mosquito)(elephant)(sinθ)

Q: What do you get if you cross a mosquito with a mountain climber?
A: Trick question. You can't cross a vector with a scaler.

Elvis Is Watching You

Trivia of the day: What do Elvis, Hades, and videos have in common?

According to my Greek professor, who knows more about etymology than ought to be humanly possible, all three words come from the same Indo-European root, wid-, meaning roughly "knowing through seeing." This root came into Latin unchanged (the sound [w] was written as v) in the verb videre, "to see," whence the English word "video." In Greek, the [w] sound was represented by the elusive digamma, which was lost very early on, leaving id-, one of several roots of the verb "to see." With the addition of an alpha privative (the fancy grammatical term for an initial alpha that negates the meaning of the word), we get the adjective aïdes, "unseen," and as a substantive (with the iota turning into an iota subscript somewhere along the way), Hades, "the unseen realm." Now that I've bored you with linguistic details, we get to the good part - how Elvis fits into all of this. If you take his name apart, "vis" is another variant of the root wid-, and "el" is a cognate to the English word "all." So Elvis is "the all-seeing one." Now does it really matter if he's alive or not?

This post was made possible by Etymological Storytime with Pavlos, a daily feature of ancient Greek class.

No Artistic Ability Required

My latest assignment for Creative Process, reading Drawing on the Artist Within and doing some drawings, has given me some serious food for thought. Let me ask you this: can you draw? If you said no, why is that? Maybe you think you have no artistic talent, but here's the thing - according to the author, that has nothing to do with it! Drawing is not (necessarily) art. It's a skill, like writing, that can be learned by any normally functioning human being. Children are taught to write; we don't expect the skill to spring fully formed from their creative inner nature. We don't worry that teaching them to write will squash their native artistic skills. Writing is a tool. What's so different about drawing? The author's claim is that we think of it differently because drawing is a visual skill, whereas writing is verbal. The process for learning to draw may be different than that of learning to write, but it is no less attainable. I should say that by "drawing" I mean "producing a realistic likeness." Remember, drawing is not art, the same way a middle schooler's essay is not literature. Drawing is the technical skill used to produce art, just as writing is the means to producing literature. It is teachable and learnable. The author's claim is that the only block to your learning to draw is that you can't see correctly - your left brain gets in the way. It doesn't really look at objects; it recognizes and names them. To draw something, you need to really look at it to see the shapes, lines and shadows it is composed of - the right brain's strength. I won't summarize the book for you in this post, but I strongly recommend reading it. Next time you catch yourself saying "I can't draw," remember that you could - you just need to learn!

The Creative Process

I had my first Creative Process class this morning. It will either be the best experience of my college career or the class I spend all semester hating. This class is all about the things I am most terrified of - public performance, improvisation, sharing my feelings, and general touchy-feely-ness. Our first assignment, due Thursday, is a one-minute musical. We must sing a song of our choice and use it to tell a story, which must have a beginning, middle and end, an identifiable character, and some kind of choreography - all in one minute. If I'm going to get through this class, I have to learn to shut out my inner cynic. The actual class activities today were really fun, though. It was mostly about body and spatial awareness - we did a lot of wandering around the classroom with our eyes closed. I think this is going to be a really good class. If nothing else, I will be getting way outside my comfort zone.