Flyer's First Day
March 26, 2010
I thought the first day of school stopped being scary after about middle school. Sure, there are always new classes with new teachers and new people, but it's really not that big of a deal, right?
I will never again lament how boring syllabus week at Dayton is after being dropped into my first day of classes in France.
It all started out well enough; I had a good breakfast and got to school early to find out my schedule. But from the time I found my name on the bulletin board, it went downhill from there.
The main problem was I was placed into the wrong class. I don't know how it happened, but instead of intermediate 300 level French like I was expecting, I was signed up for all sorts of basic French classes!
I wanted to explain there had been a mistake but there was no chance, as we went from welcome presentation to information session and on to our courses.
After the first hour of an insanely easy course, I thought deeply about how best to express to my professor that the class was the equivalent of Geber mashed pears to my at least Raman noodle ready French tongue. It's a delicate thing even in English, to tell a professor her course is a joke, but getting it out politely in French was still more difficult. But I think I managed and she agreed to give me another test that afternoon to see if I could move up.
It all came down to two skills; writing and speaking. I had to write a narrative about my past semester in my home country. And the professor inquired, could I use imparfait to express it? All my memories of high school classes cursing the tense came back to me as I shakily wrote out my stories about a semester in VWK.
After successfully expressing my memories in words I had to complete the final step and sit down and talk with the director of placement. In French of course. In his office he read over my reflections on everyday life and Dayton. Hoping to have me demonstrate my ability to speak French above a beginning level, he inquired about what I'd written. The popularity of basketball caught his eye. Oh, your school has a team, he wanted to know? And so I found myself, the Monday after the Dayton Flyers gave Xavier the loss they deserved, explaining in French to the director of pedagogy the ways of the Flyer Fans.
I count him as converted to the Flyer Faithful as I was transferred into the my current and correct level. But the experience leaves me convinced that even far from home one can never underestimate the importance of the imparfait and Flyer basketball.
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