So at UPS we only have about 12 hours of class a week, and only 4 classes. Here we have 11 classes and 20 hours of class or more per week. It is a lot of class, but the classes doesn't feel as long as I thought they would.
The only day where I pretty much felt totally brain dead was Thursday because we had 7 hours of class with only one half hour break for lunch. We also had a two hour grammar class that day which may have been the most painful two hours I have ever sat through in my life. The first hour was splitting sentences up and assigning functions to each part of the sentence. The professor used words like complement of an direct object, complement of an antecedent, and many other words I can't even remember. He also went through it all so fast assuming everyone in the class understood exactly what he was saying; apparently he didn't notice the 5 gaping Americans staring at him with looks of confusion. I'm pretty sure that in European education they learn this type of grammar but I have never been asked the function of a word in a sentence once in my entire 14 years of education, so needless to say I was completely confused. The next hour of grammar was spent going over conjugations in every tense of irregular verbs. This part was also done extremely fast and with no explanation which was a problem since he was introducing a tense that none of us had ever been expected to learn because it is only used in literature and never used in speaking - the passée simple (or the simple past). So now before next Thursday I have to figure out how it is conjugated and memorize all of the irregular conjugations. I would not care if it was actually useful knowledge, but it is mostly pointless knowledge that is not worth spending my time on since I will never use it unless I decide to write the next great French novel.
Other than that awful grammar class though the classes have been pretty easy and the two hours of each class have passed by very quickly which is surprising since we are so acclimated to the 50 minute class! And the best part about school here is we barely have any homework, and since each class is only once a week we have a week to complete what little homework we do have - that part makes spending 8 more hours in class worth it, because instead of leaving class with a mountain of homework (which is the case at UPS), we leave with one or two exercises.
We also started our culture courses this week, in level 5 we have to take 3 and I am taking art history, politics, and economics. These courses only meet every other week, so so far I have only had politics and art history. Art history was pretty terrible because the professor spoke really fast and I understood everything he was saying but was scrambling to write down notes fast enough. He also didn't have slides for our paintings so a whole amphitheater of students had to look at a picture of a painting by Kandinsky in a small book. Let's just say it didn't work at all! But I had politics today and it was really great, the professor was really awesome and even though it is a lot of stuff I had learned before it was interesting to get politics from a French perspective.
We are off to Beaune - the biggest city in Burgundy - tomorrow on an excursion with Nathalie which should be really fun! I am so ready to get out and explore new cities and travel! A bientot!
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