Tomorrow there is a party scheduled for ISEP students that will unfortunately force me to miss my French writing class, the only class I actually feel like I know what I'm doing. Being me, I made sure that all the homework and classwork that I would be missing was done so that I could hand it in today after the class, a fact that seemed to genuinely surprise the professor.
One of the class exercises for tomorrow involves the concordance of time where we are given sentences with two actions and we are supposed to add in the time conjunctions that link the two together. Alors que, aussitôt longtemps que, depuis que, pendant, à, dès, avant que, après...the list goes on and on. There are so many that I cannot memorize them all in a single night and after looking at them for a while they all start to lose their edges and blur together.
I told the prof as much as soon as she started looking over the paper. She told me that she could tell I liked grammar. Curious, I asked her how she knew that.
You're always early to class. You listen attentively and always smile. You draw pretty trees when you concentrate on something you don't understand.
With just three sentences she had me pinned down completely. I do like grammar. Like math, it is a rigid code and if you know how to use the code, then you can say pretty much anything. Or at least this is how it seems in a classroom. Language in the real world is an entirely different entity.
When I said the same thing to the professor in (not-so-broken) French something happened between describing the difference between the classroom and real life.
A brief pause.
And during this pause my mind took over. Suddenly my hand was gesturing and my and my mouth was pursed and had admitted a slight puff of air, two gestures I have seen countless times over the past three weeks and never really thought twice about. Now, after they had been performed by me, they made my entire body suddenly feel like a foreign country.
The feeling passed and I began to finish my thought.
Sitting here six hours later, I can no longer feel that foreign sensation. The only thing left of it is the memory and even that doesn't scare me anymore.
One of the class exercises for tomorrow involves the concordance of time where we are given sentences with two actions and we are supposed to add in the time conjunctions that link the two together. Alors que, aussitôt longtemps que, depuis que, pendant, à, dès, avant que, après...the list goes on and on. There are so many that I cannot memorize them all in a single night and after looking at them for a while they all start to lose their edges and blur together.
I told the prof as much as soon as she started looking over the paper. She told me that she could tell I liked grammar. Curious, I asked her how she knew that.
You're always early to class. You listen attentively and always smile. You draw pretty trees when you concentrate on something you don't understand.
With just three sentences she had me pinned down completely. I do like grammar. Like math, it is a rigid code and if you know how to use the code, then you can say pretty much anything. Or at least this is how it seems in a classroom. Language in the real world is an entirely different entity.
When I said the same thing to the professor in (not-so-broken) French something happened between describing the difference between the classroom and real life.
A brief pause.
And during this pause my mind took over. Suddenly my hand was gesturing and my and my mouth was pursed and had admitted a slight puff of air, two gestures I have seen countless times over the past three weeks and never really thought twice about. Now, after they had been performed by me, they made my entire body suddenly feel like a foreign country.
The feeling passed and I began to finish my thought.
Sitting here six hours later, I can no longer feel that foreign sensation. The only thing left of it is the memory and even that doesn't scare me anymore.
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