French Flashback

View from the apartment in Nice

My French class is very strange this year. Strange, because it is unlike any language class I have ever taken. I have finally jumped all of the dull old grammar hurdles, and am now taking what is essentially French literature, with almost no focus on grammar.

Well, the teacher corrects any mistakes, and there was one short grammar test, but that's it.

Everything else is like the French classes I took when I was on exchange in Nice.

Oh, yeah, except that here we're high up in the tower of RA's Franklin Building, not in one of the basement rooms of the Cours Albert Camus. (Huh - interesting to think I've taken classes in both a medieval city hall and a former villa just off the Promenade des Anglais, complete with the original ceiling moldings.) And usually, there is rain beating against the windows, not hot Mediterranean sun.

But physical differences aside, I get flashbacks all the time in that class.

The first day, the teacher started lecturing on French history, and I was elated - I didn't care too much about the subject, but it was like being in Seconde again, trying to follow the teacher's dictations, and copying the notes of the girl next to me most of the time as I couldn't keep up (later, when I spoke French, I found that she was terrible at writing her own language so I have no idea what most of my early class notes are supposed to say).

My teacher here is always reminding us to pay attention to l'ortographe, which brings back memories of that fancy, complicated paper, with each line divided by four paler lines, to indicate how high the staff of a 'd' or 'l' should go ('d's, for your information, only go to the second line, while 'l's go to the third).

When we mention Baudelaire's "Le Spleen de Paris", I remember the formidable headmistress standing at the head of the 1er classroom, asking if anyone knew what a spleen was. Then I wish I had paid much more attention in my French classes, which I dismissed about as easily as I dismissed economics and history. Because - well, what about Baudelaire's "Spleen de Paris"?

The main difference, unfortunately, is that I am actually getting graded for my work in this French course.

This is a bit of a plus in the case of things like Baudelaire, because I actually have to pay attention.

More of a curse, though, when it comes to having to pay close attention to dictations and l'orthgraphe. Especially l'orthographe. Here I feel an inescapable American-ness: my hand-writing is terrible, and no one ever taught us any better in school. To be fair, we had italics books in 1st grade, but that stuff was ug-lee, and I never used that again. I learned it better when I lived in France, but the paper is thicker there, and it has those handy lines to guide you, while here the ink just sinks through to the other side and your 'd's and 'l's are all the same height.

Overall, I have mixed feelings about the class. The emphasis on neat handwriting does not apply to the rest of RA, and seems very out-of-place. The fact that it takes place in the language lab, way up in the Franklin Tower, gives it a fairy-tale aspect. Plus, we use a different language, so entering and exiting the room is a little like passing through to a different dimension.

More realistically though, it's just too much. We started with the 17th century and are going right through to the 20th. We read excerpts, excerpts, excerpts, and work on writing commentaires - highly stylized French analyses of texts. While we're supposed to read three books on our own, we don't all read and discuss any complete book, or even story, in class.

But I love the memories it revives for me.