rantrantrant
Yesterday night I went for a run around the track and, tripping over a rock, did a spectacular air-summer-sault and collapsed in a heap on the ground. Being France, the medical building on campus was already closed and so were all the pharmacies, and there was no way I was talking the tram 15 minutes away to go to the huge, crowded mega-store for some sort of frozen vegetables...so I took some ibuprofen and curled up in my bed with my foot up and felt sorry for myself.
Also added to this story should be the reason why I went running in the first place since I'm usually one to avoid any sort of physical activity like the plague. We had a graded presentation today in my oral French class and it ended up already taking 5-10 minutes over the already THREE HOUR long class (without our usual break) to get everyone presented, and then she took a full 30 MINUTES more to go on a rant about how she was so disappointed. Apparently French teachers are big on public critique :/ According to her, my abilities in speaking and comprehension are rendered completely worthless by my pathetic grammar usage. Thanks. Thanks a lot.
I mean, trust me, I know I'm never perfectly grammatical. For two and a half out of my four years of French instruction, I have been in classes with both students AND teachers who could care less about the subject. So even though I DID care, it's not like I had much motivation to spend the time and study everything. Yes, I know you can really tell, but do you know how much I wish it were differently? Trust me, if I could go back to high school and tell myself to fight harder to be placed into French II immediately, believe me, I would. In fact, even better, I would tell my 6th grade self to take French, not Spanish (dear god why did I do that??). No one has to remind me. Instead of yelling at me, why don't you teach me? This is an oral class, no? So why don't we speak more? Why don't you correct me when I speak? You're the teacher, that's your job.
Also, on a good day, I have the best French accent in the class, I'm pretty sure I have the best oral comprehension, I know I am the best at reading comprehension...I really should be in a higher level but I realized it too late ("too late" being a mere week into classes) so they wouldn't let me move up. Already I feel like I'm wasting so much time here not knowing French. I'm never going to learn it unless I'm forced to speak it constantly, which is decidedly not the case. I emailed my advisor last night about possibly switching universities to one that doesn't have a foreign student program because it's impossibly to be around French students here. I doubt I'll be able to, but really, I desperately need to stop being around so many Americans and Asians who speak English anyway and be forced to listen and speak colloquial French (which, even though I understand almost everything my teachers say, is absolutely beyond my comprehension) with real French people. I'm lazy, I'm not going to do it unless I absolutely have to.
Which is why my raging bitch of a French teacher's rant is not going to help in the slightest, unless her goal was to get me to resent her even more. That's where the ill-timed run came in, to hopefully zone out and work off steam and stop thinking for a little while. And, pre-malevolent rock incident, I decided it is sort of my fault, too. I really don't understand why it is so easy for me to spend an hour a day teaching myself hiragana like I have been for the past week, a language I've never studied nor will probably ever have the opportunity for fluency in, yet it is next to impossible to get me to do my French homework, something that is actually of vital use to the country I am actually IN. So...maybe I should start studying more. I watched one of my movies with the French language option and felt like I was further along at the end than at the beginning, and maybe this weekend I'll actually look over my homework. It's just...so frustrating. I want to just be able to do it, and not think about it. In the meantime, I think I'm going to be looking at other schools in France.