C'est la vie

If you're reading this, native English speaker, you are the crème de la crème, you never make a faux pas. I envy you your joie de vivre and the fact that your savior-faire has never been put in question. You speak English par excellence and tête-à-têtes with friends are never so difficult as needing to be ended by a coup de grâce. Au contraire, you have carte blanche to say whatever you wish, because you're a native English speaker, n'est-ce pas? The pièce de résistance is that speaking English is very à la mode and will make you friends en masse.

I wrote the above paragraph because going to classes here is sometimes a little bit like that but in reverse. You hear: françaisfrançais françaisfrançais françaisfrançais brainstorming françaisfrançaisfrançais input français. These days, there is so much English in French that I sometimes wonder if the other foreigners in my class are understanding as much as I am or if they just hear: françaisfrançais français wosdighaosdb français. Anyways, here are just a few musings from various different classes these past two weeks. 

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L'analyse de la bande dessinée franco-belge

This class is about analyzing French/Belgian comic strips, an important element of Francophone culture, and hence why it's an option for us foreigners to take as a way to better understand the Francophones around us. The professor has far too much content and enthusiasm to fit into an hour-and-a-half lecture, so he seems to be talking at twice the speed as the other French-as-a-Foreign-Language teachers. He informs us that the course is part of an inter-disiplinary option for the entire faculty so he asks if there are any students among us who are native French speakers. When two people raise their hands, he asks if they are comic book fans. "You mustn't hesitate to say that you are passionate about comics!" he encourages them. It occurred to me that it is probably one of the only places where they were ever going to be validated for loving comics, and the professor endeavored to show us in the rest of the lesson just how valuable and valid the art of comics really is. After all, it has a history, it has creativity, it has been around for longer than you would have expected, and it isn't just aimed at children. (Although most comics are directed toward a male audience.) But, he made the point that we often don't think something is a serious subject until it has been studied at universities and how many classes on comics do you know about? Once, film also wasn't considered a "serious" subject, although nowadays it is studied in lots of academic institutions and there are film schools all over the place. Ever heard of a comic book school? It's not like I'm a big comic book reader or anything, but I do enjoy a lot of the films that are based off of them and at the crossroads of cinema/art history/literature you will find comics. 

Seminare de littérature

Ah, the familiar subject of literature! Reading and reading and reading and then writing and analyzing. Discussing in class about literary techniques, and historical context, and groundbreaking stories. Falling in love with fictional characters and referring to authors as your bffs. Yup, I love it all.  Wait, you want me to read three French novels and write two 15 page papers...in French? Umm, help? 

It is abundantly clear that Professor B doesn't think much of the stuffy little classroom he's been assigned for our lit seminar. Or maybe I'm mistaken and his exclamation as he walked into class was more about the fact that out of the nine students in the class there is only one guy. After laying out his expectations for the class he launches into a little bit of a history lesson to give the context for the eighteenth century novel which is what we will spend the year learning about. He breaks down Descartes' entire Discours de la méthode without referencing notes and occasionally scribbling something on the white board. He talks about Montesquieu's Lettres persanes, the first novel we will be reading, as though he can hardly wait to start re-reading it and yet in the same breath warns us that it isn't easy and we should start tackling it as soon as possible. His obvious knowledge and passion for French lit is a little intimidating and just a tad contagious so that by the end of the lesson I'm thinking I can probably handle it. I haven't cracked open the book yet though so maybe I'll live to regret it...

Discours écrits et oraux 2

We generally refer to this class as DEO2 and it is essentially a language class where you practice reading and writing and presenting in French. Our professor is a young guy who is (unlike the professor I had for DEO1) extremely organized. Since he teaches another class as well, those of us in the diploma have him for 3 classes a week. He learns our names at an astonishing rate, and it takes him only one class to determine that I'm an English speaker. (This may have been helped by the fact that I was speaking in English to British girl in my class...) Our first project for the class consists of reading a 160 page play called The Old Woman's Visit. I spend a good chunk of my Saturday reading it and looking up each French word I didn't know. Vamper for example is: to seduce in the manner of a vampire, a word which would probably have been incredibly useful for Stephanie Meyer and perhaps is used in the French translations? It is a surprisingly funny and very readable little story that I actually found quite enjoyable. In about two weeks I'll have to do an oral presentation on it.

Atelier d'écriture scientifique
This class is a writing workshop. Finally, we are going to learn the nitty gritty little tricks to produce lovely academic writings. Things that have nasty words like thesis, argument, bibliography and footnote attached it it. I can't say that I'm particularly thrilled about the subject matter of this class although I do think it will be very useful. At the moment I'm mostly distracted by the fact that my professor looks rather like a female version of Geoffrey Rush...

Have you done your homework yet, mate?

Shall we sally forth to the chalet?

At the beginning of this semester, the GBU had a training camp in the mountains at, you guessed it, a chalet! I'd never been to this particular one before but it was in the canton of Neuchâtel and took just under 2 hours from Lausanne to get there. (I was lucky enough to go by car.) After winding up narrow roads and through charming little villages we arrived at the chalet with a charming view of fields and mountains and...more chalets!

The weekend was designed for French-speakers so when two Finns came along from Geneva without much French between them, I translated for them for most of Saturday and another student translated for them Sunday. This required quite a bit of concentration when the different session leaders spoke particularly quickly. I wasn't doing any kind of formal translation so it was mostly just summarizing the main points of what the person had just said in whispers to the Finns beside me.

The main speakers for the weekend were a young French couple who had written a book designed as a kind of handbook for Christian students. They came with their two kids, a 13 month old and a one month old. This meant that during pretty much every session one or other of them was wearing the baby and the wife would sometimes pull out a bottle, stick it in the baby's mouth and continue talking! They were pretty impressive. Their parenting skills aside, their content was also really great and engaging. I struggled to keep up sometimes since they spoke super fast!

One of the Swiss staff did a session on sharing your faith and her main point was to find the ways in which the gospel connects to our culture. She incorporated secular music videos and films to illustrate how it would be easy to get a conversation going, to identify what are the problems we agree with and how the Bible offers different solutions. Even if you don't speak French you can check out below a music video by the popular Belgian artist Stromae that she used as one of the examples. In it, Stromae asks a lot of questions about who is God? And why doesn't he answer? His video crosses a church service with a rock concert and the idea is that instead of worshipping God he worships music.

All in all, it was a pretty cool weekend and I'm glad that I went. I think everyone learned a lot and went away feeling encouraged.