It's Vacation Time...sort of

So, like the title suggests, this post will be about the fact that it is sort of vacation time for me again.  I'm sure you must be asking "Wait, how is this possible? She's only been back in school 2 weeks." And that's right, I have been back in school two weeks, and I now have another week off. This week off is just for the juniors at my school. In fact, as a junior(in science track), you take 3 different parts of your bac(the big huge test that you have to pass to graduate high school.) You take the other parts at the end of your senior year. Junior year you take bac francais, bac history-geography(but only if you are in science track, and this is actually the first year) and TPE. TPE is a group project that we have been working on since the beginning of October, with 2 hours per week to work. This week coming up is the week of the final presentations. All of the juniors at my school have the week off, and the only days we have to come to school are the 30 minutes for our graded presentation, and 4 hours on friday morning to take a french test. Besides that, we are free. Some people have the TPE on monday, so then they really do have time to chill. Others, like me, do their presentation on thursday afternoon, so will be stressed all week. Since my grade on the bac doesn't count at all, I don't really care, but it will be interesting to see what the real situation is like. But, it's not totally a week off. For example, all of our teachers bogged us down with lots of homework because they said "You're not on vacation. this is a week of work."

So, my apologies for not writing for 2 weeks. I'm sure you must all be dying to know if everything is ok, I mean, why didn't I write last week? Well, 2 reasons. For one, I really had nothing exciting to write about. I had had a week of school, and that was it. and For two, I got sick last weekend and spent most of saturday rolling around the house, half dead with a headache and a fever. So, I decided that the blog could wait.

Sunday I went to an AFS activity, a board games afternoon. There were several women who brought bags and bags of games, but most of the the time we exchange students were most comfortable playing our card games. We tried to play a round of Time's up! which is like Taboo or catch phrase, but there were too many people trying to play and the words were too hard. We were 18 people on teams of three, and I was at one end of the table and could never hear what was going on. And, the words were all actors or musicians that not very many people and certainly almost none of us exchange students knew. We also had a big snack(since almost every family brought some food) so that was cool. I made chocolate chip muffins, which actually turned out dry and disappointing. Some of my favorites were the mini donuts, the sugar tart, and the cookies. 

My chocolate chip muffins.

I also made some muffins for my host family. These are more like muffin tops without the muffin. We didn't have enough molds but wanted to cook lots at a time, so we used mini tart molds, which turned out these muffin tops.

Then it was back to school for another week. Monday was the last 2 hours of TPE, meaning that from now on, I will finish on monday at 330 instead of 530.

Tuesday, we didn't get to do a lab in my science classes because my teachers are in the period of what are called "Conseils de classe." Since my physics teacher had a class counsel that night, we had physics all together and then SVT all together, instead of splitting into 1/2 groups. So, conseils de classe are when all of the teachers of a certain class(like the math teacher, the physics teacher, the english teacher, ect of one particular group of 30 kids) the student delegates of that class(2 students that are elected by the class to serve as the link between the kids and the teachers) the principal of the school and 2 parents of kids in the class all come together one night to discuss the trimester. There is a conseil de classe for each class at the end of each trimester. They all talk about each student(for example, their progress, if they seem to be having troubles, if they cause problems in class, ect.) They talk about the class in general(like the grades are too low, or the class is too talkative or ...) The student delegates present any student requests for the trimester to come(like maybe they think a certain teacher gives too much homework ect.) And it just sort of finishes off the trimester and gets ready for the next trimester. I think it is a good idea, but it puts some extra strain on the teachers when they have to work all day and then they have to do the conseil from 630 until 8 or 900pm. And some teachers, like my spanish teacher, have 7 classes, so that is quite a bit of time extra when they could be grading.

We also had our last section of step aerobics in PE before we will move on to swimming for next time. We got to make up our own routines and to finish off, Laure and I did forward rolls off of the steps and into our final pose. It was pretty fun, and I'm sad that step is over.

On Thursday, my class was very noisy and my teacher gave us a pop quiz to punish us. He collected the quiz and the class was dead silent. He said that if we continued to be noisy he would grade it, if we were quiet he wouldn't. Needless to say, the entire rest of the hour passed in silence. That silence even lasted to Friday morning when we had 2 hours of math. We were finished with everything the teacher had planned with a full 20 minutes to spare today. Our teacher was pretty happy. He put some equations on the board and asked us to solve them. I finished quickly and the rest of the class was very confused. My neighbors started begging for help, so I turned around and said that I would help them out. At which point, my teacher, who has a very good level of english, told me that i was allowed to help them but that i had to speak in english. So i said ok, and started. Pretty soon, everyone was desperately trying to listen to me explain rather than trying on their own, so my teacher sent me to the chalk board and told me to explain, but again, in english. It was so weird to try to force myself to keep speaking english when my classmates kept shooting questions at me in french and i could sense that it would be so much easier if i just explained in french. I kept switching to french and my teacher kept saying "that's not english, in english." And he kept laughing at my and my awkwardly constructed english sentences as i tried to simultaneously speak simple english and explain rather complicated math. at times i would stick in random numbers in french as i was saying the equation, or other silly things.

And while we're on the topic of language, let me just say how weird it is for me to be taking spanish here. Today we had a test and for one, I was really happy with myself for having understood the questions. Then i started to try to respond, but my spanish is still horrible. I realized after a few minutes that I was writing long, complicated phrases in french in my head and then trying to put them in spanish. I wasn't thinking in english at all. and really, going from french to spanish was easier than english to spanish, since i was already thinking about conjugation and a lot of the words are more similar from spanish to french than english.

And to finish off, I want to send a  big thank you to my friends for the care package that I got in the mail.   

It was so wonderful to open the box that showed up and have the smell of peanut butter wash right over me. I had such a fun time looking through all of the thoughtful gifts from back home. It reminded me of summer camp when I used to get care packages, except that I always knew exactly what was in them and what day they would arrive. This one was so nicely full of surprises and just made me feel so cared about.

So, that's it for the update. Plans for the weekend: My school's open house where I will be doing guided visits and be getting a free t-shirt and performing my step routine(my teacher's idea of showing off which sports are offered in PE), Saturday afternoon a handball game and an uninterrupted viewing of this week's The Voice. And Sunday, chilling out around the house, maybe cooking up something yummy, and eating chocolate, since Sunday doesn't count as lent.