We finally got some nice weather here. This whole month of May has felt like November with cold winds and rain and fog. But this week, the sun finally broke through, and I was able to go to school from morning to afternoon without even bringing a sweatshirt as a precaution. Everyone around me complains about how it is too hot, but I'm just so happy to finally be freed from lugging my huge coat everywhere that I don't care. And besides, I think my body has lost the ability to say "I'm hot" because I have spent the entire year practically shivering. Boy am I going to get a shock when I head back to 100 degree California in just a few weeks. Luckily I'll be escaping to the mountains and the ocean for the first few weeks back as I go to summer camp.
We have all been enjoying the nice weather(partially from fear that it won't last) in eating outside for lunch and dinner, as well as working and doing homework under the sun. Also, since we are farther north than back home, the sun goes down really late. Last night, it was practically 10pm and it felt like 7:30pm.
Something cultural I learned the other day: You know how in the USA we say "If you bring the umbrella, then it won't rain, but if you leave it at home it will"? Here, they are the opposite. They say that "if you bring the umbrella, it will encourage the rain and it is better to leave it at home." Interesting, huh?
So, a rundown of the week. With just 2 weeks of school left, classes are starting to wind down as teachers count how many hours of class they have left. For example, since we only have Spanish 2 times per week, we only have 4 hours of class left, so the teacher doesn't want to start too much. In one class, we have so little time left that we are just going to watch a movie for our last few hours. Other teachers, however, are pushing harder than ever, determined to finish all of the material. In history and in French, we are moving at lightning speed and being assigned classwork as homework because those teachers don't have a choice: the material will be on the Bac whether they finish teaching it or not. In history today, we did in one hour what we normally would have done in 3 hours!
So, Monday was a normal school day, with a test in my "History in English class." In the afternoon, after class, I went to the track to try to get back in soccer shape, especially since handball is done. Oh man, I did not realize I was so badly out of shape. I mean, I had been jogging in the park at least 2 or 3 times a week and playing handball, so I thought I'd be ok. I tried to do some of the normal stuff we do for soccer conditioning, and I thought I was going to fall apart. I couldn't finish half of what I used to do. Oh well, I guess that's a small price to pay for this year.
Tuesday was our Scientific day, like every Tuesday. We had Bio, math, and swimming in the morning, and physics, physics lab, and bio lab in the afternoon. Tuesdays are very exhausting, but we learn a lot in those science classes. At the pool, it was the evaluation day, and they did it like how the kids are evaluated for the bac, except we only did 2 swims instead of 3. Basically, you swim 50 yards and get timed, and then you have to estimate an interval of 3 seconds, and if your time is within that three seconds, you get the self-evaluation point for that race. Then you have 10 minutes or recuperation where you have to swim constantly but not fast. And then you do it again. You have to do one lap with two strokes(changing at 25 meters), another lap with 2 strokes(at least one of which is different that your first lap) and a third lap where you can do what you want. Full points for boys is under 40 seconds for the average of the three laps and for girls in under 44 seconds, I think.
Wednesdays are language days, since we have English, 2 hours of french, history, and spanish/german. In french we continued our poetry analysis(which, as you can imagine, is not very easy for me) and in history we are studying colonization and decolonization, and they just skip right over what happened in the middle. I also had my French oral on Wednesday afternoon. It went well, but considering I got to choose the text I was tested on and the jury knew I was american and had fun asking me questions about America and my time in France rather than testing me on the documents, that is understandable. I mean, it is a 10 minute exposition where the jury(just some french teacher not from the school) gives a question, you have 30 minutes to prepare, and then you respond. Mine was "by what means does Voltaire critique his time?" and my supporting document was the beginning of The history of the travels of Scarmentado written by himself. Then there is a 10 minute interview where the jury is supposed to ask you about the complementary documents we studied in class. That was when she preferred to ask me about America, why I was in France, why I had had trouble with the theater section, why I had liked the mystery novel section, whether I read Murder mysteries in the USA, whether I watched them on TV, ect; so I only ended up talking about the documents for like 4 of the 10 minutes. The first oral, I was basically treated like all the other kids by the jury except that I had given a list of texts in advance. Here, it was much less formal and more fun, but I felt less like any other French kid. Speaking of being just like everyone else, we did get our anonymously corrected history tests back, and I got 13 out of 20, one of the better grades in the class(the average was about 11.7) I even got 1/1 for spelling and grammar, when there was a french kid who got 0!
Thursday was a normal Thursday except that we ended an hour early. Like I talked about before, when teachers are absent, there aren't substitutes(unless is is going to be a prolonged absence.) Class is just cancelled. On Thursday morning, the English teacher was absent, so our math class was moved to the English time, and we got to leave early. That is what is cool about the "One class of 30 kids with whom you have all of your classes" system, because had we all had other classes later, that wouldn't have worked. Friday, our SVT teacher was absent, so we got to finish at lunchtime, so her class was cancelled.
In Philosophy class, we finally actually did something logical and structured. Since the beginning of the year, that class had been complete chaos where the teacher just comes in and talks, half the kids don't listen, other kids shout out, he writes nothing on the board except a word or two, and in the whole year I had taken 5 pages of notes. One day he told us Descartes theory to prove the existence of God. One day we talked about the difference between a political regime and an ideology. One day we talked about the difference between the state and the nation. Well, we finally did something structured an logical: syllogisms. We learned the first four formulas of the 16 valid syllogisms, and I think we will probably continue that when we next have class. For those who don't know, the famous syllogism is the BARBARA, or the AAA, and an example is All men are mortal, all Greeks are men, therefore all Greeks are mortal.
So, to finish off this post, I was recently interviewed by someone at my school to put an article in the school paper. I was worried they would ask tricky questions, but it was easy stuff like my name and my decision to come here. I was also worried they'd use my responses word for word, but she promised to tweak them here and there to correct the language mistakes. And, she wanted me to come in and take a picture with friends from my class for the paper, so here you go. Have a good memorial day weekend.
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| The photo for the interview |
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