Playing the cool foreigner

Peur du jour - 5 Mars 2012: Giving my time

So yesterday I started volunteering on Monday mornings in addition to Thursday mornings at lycée Jules Guesde. I was a little unsure about it because I had formerly spent my Monday mornings exercising and doing work for class. I also have three hours of class in the afternoon, so my Mondays will feel pretty packed now. I also would be working in three different classrooms with three different teachers which means three potentially different experiences from what I've been having. Basically I was letting a lot of little things cloud my mind about wanting to get more involved.

But in my twenty and half years of living, I've learned the most cherished thing that you can give to any person is your time, so I decided to make the commitment and plunge into an extra three hours on Monday mornings. I'm so glad that I did! I worked with two classes that are very similar to the classes I have been helping on Thursday mornings, but I also got the opportunity to work with the "international" class. These are French students whose course work has an international focus (particularly on anglophone studies).

These students are highly motivated (ie. a breath of fresh air) and are speaking at an elevated level of English. I came in on the day that they were starting to discuss The Crucible (they just finished reading and performing Romeo and Juliet). For the first half of the class they had a mini history lesson about America's Puritan founding. I was definitely having flashbacks to my Junior year English class where we read Jonathan Edwards and William Bradford and Anne Bradstreet and, of course, Hawthorne's Scarlet Letter.

Then, the second half of class, I introduced myself and answered any questions they might have about me/my experiences. It was so so SO weird to be on this side of the equation. I remember the few times that French students came to my high school: our classes would always be so excited to speak to them in French and ask them about French school and culture and life and food and EVERYTHING. The French students mostly asked me about my experience as an American college student. I talked about marching band, greek life, SATs/ACTs, my internship in Washington D.C., living in the dorms, majors/minors... It's always so funny when I run into French people who are enthralled with American culture or the English language. One man's home is another person's exotic fantasy.

Also, everyone could understand my accent. A nice change of pace..