J'étudie le français cet semestre

I am a student again, and it feels so good. I've been wanting to improve my French for a long time, and now that Agatha is in kindergarten, I felt I could schedule the time to take a French class. I'm in 102, the second semester of the language. I took a year of French in grad school in order to pass the language exam for my PhD, and I've even read 18th-c French fashion journals in Parisian libraries for my research, but I really can't speak it, write it, or understand someone speaking it much at all. So this class is a big challenge.

But oh, the joy of being a student! To know what your assignment is, plain and simple, and then to do it. To be the recipient of all the interesting activities and stimulating assignments carefully planned by your professor. To enjoy camaraderie with my fellow students, who treat me as one of them-- "tu"-ing me and muttering, after I flub an answer, "good try." (Except for the young man from Kenya who is so polite and deferential to me as a professor, always smiling and bidding me "au revoir, Madame.") To have that feeling of borders expanding. At a time of my life where my responsibilities seem (at times) weighty and amorphous, where I have to figure out the task before I can even begin to accomplish it, where success is contested or difficult to measure, and where some jobs are never-ending, being a student again is such a deep pleasure.

I had my first quiz on Friday. It was so hard! I reveled/complained to Michael at lunch afterwards about how, in order to fill in the blanks in a section on a traveling cousin, I had to know the correct gender of the countries mentioned, as well as the rule about countries vs cities having articles or not, as well as the correct preposition used to express going TO that country or being IN it, as WELL as what the different contractions of preposition + article looked like. I had studied all those things individually, but to be required to reproduce them all in the correct combinations, well.... I took a stab at it but I felt like it was a level of competence just beyond my grasp. I marveled, as if for the first time, at the way a test forces you to confront the shallowness of your knowledge about a topic. I vowed to study harder, to make myself write it all out next time, and not just to read the textbook and feel that was close enough. I also knew I'd blown the correct gender of champagne in another section that completely depended on getting the gender of that word correct. Le sigh.

We got back our quizzes yesterday, though, and I got 88%! Yes, I messed up the champagne, but I guessed correctly on the "en" "au" "le" and "à." I huddled with my fellow students in the hallway to discuss. They, unfortunately, had not guessed correctly. In fact, they had not realized that the prepositions needed to be there at all, and so they failed that whole section. And the complicated manipulations of the champagne-- and how the preposition is not conjugated when it is a negative statement-- they didn't get that either. "Oh, I know, that was so hard!" I agreed. But their outrage was directed against our professor, the charming Roderick. "Champagne wasn't one of the words on our vocab list!" "I studied so hard. The worksheets were so easy! This was nothing like our homework." "I memorized all the verb conjugations; why weren't we tested on that?!" I was startled. "Well," trying to redirect, "let's ask him for harder homework, then, that will prepare us for the tests." They agreed there would be some indignant conferences in Roderick's office forthcoming.

I guess much of this is the difference between being dix-huit ans and being quarante-et-quatre ans. Right now I'm immersed in a complex political issue at the college, an issue I care about and on which I got steam-rolled last year by superior political operators. I was naive, and I made mistakes, and the right thing (in my view) failed to get done. This year, I have another chance and I'm trying to make the right moves at the right times, and to learn from what went wrong last year. When I screw up as a grown-up, I have to figure out how to do better next time. I can't ask my opponents to just change the test, or to make my path to victory easier. The sooner mes copines learn this, the better for them. However, I also understand the deep, deep comfort in accomplishing clear, straightforward tasks. I guess they should enjoy it while they can. And my success is right there in black-and-white: 88%.