Teacher's pet

For the first time in my life I've been the teacher's pet this week in my new French classes. I was often a bit naughty in school, not the cool smoking on the bus kind, the playing pranks on teachers and being cheeky kind. My top prank was when I wheeled this big sign that said "injections taking place no entry" from a place where it wasn't being used, to in front of some stairs. This was at a time when the school was experimenting with a one way system where one set of stairs was for going up and one set were for going down. So this messed up the whole system. No one saw us move it, which meant we could then stand around and watch the whole thing unravel. At first people were just confused, then people started disobeying the sign and then a teacher saw people disobeying the sign and took it upon herself to enforce the sign. But there was no way for people to get upstairs and so more and more angry people started clogging up the area, then more teachers got involved and started arguing. It was an interesting lesson in conformity which I late referenced in a psychology exam about conformity.

The closest I've got to being a teachers pet was A-level art. I was never that great at art at GCSE, I only got a B. I didn't spend much time on it because there were so many other subjects to focus on, and then at A level I really enjoyed it, and did it every day (and got an A). The geekiest thing I did was read a book about African batik where they use starch, and then I experimented with loads of different starch based things. I found one that worked and started dying fabric that way, and then I had to demonstrate my findings to the class. But for some reason you don't get bullied for being an art geek, so that's nice, because I did get bullied for plenty of other stuff. 

A-level art was the last time you could get good marks for painting nice pictures. When I studied it at uni they didn't care about nice pictures anymore, it was all about the concepts and I went back to being average again.

awkward teenage me with my GCSE art work.

Some of my art from second year of uni.

This week and last week I started two different French classes. The best thing is that they don't know about each other, so they might both think I'm making great progress, not realising I'm making the expected progress for someone doing 4 days a week of French. First I started a very local French evening class, which is like a club you sign up to. The teachers are volunteers and it only cost 20 Euros for the whole year, for two evenings a week. No one else in the class is an English speaker. It's two chatty Spanish old ladies, one Dominican lady, a Mongolian guy and me. The teachers speak zero English and so it's like a massive game of charades/pictionary. It's ok for me because I speak enough French to work stuff out, but there was a 10 minute game of charades just to try and explain the past and future tense to the Dominican. I'm still not sure she really understands anything.

My other class is the one I legally have to go to, to get my visa. A few weeks ago I had a medical and a french test at the OFII and after doing the test I was award 200 hours of free French lessons.

This is the office for immigration and integration logo, but look closely at it....

why is that guy with creepy Mr tickle hands trying to grope the blue lady's boob?!

It's always nice to do a test where if you fail you get free stuff, though last time I did one was my dyslexia test. Basically if you fail a spelling test, you get a free laptop. I'd narrowly missed out on dyslexic money a few years earlier because the test included the word "Psalms" and my Christian upbringing had scuppered my chances, with my knowledge of spelling Old Testament books. 

I started these free lesson on Thursday, it's mainly refugees from Afghanistan and a few others like a couple from Georgia and me. There are no other native English speakers again, but some of the Afghan guys speak a bit of English. The teacher is really nice and I managed to get a reputation for being one of the good ones. At the beginning of the first day she asked me name, I said, "Hannah" she said, "can I call you Anna?" The French really struggle with "H." She asked if it was a British name, which it isn't really it's from the Bible, so I think it's a Hebrew name. But I looked it up today in the French bible and Hannah (in the book of 1 Samuel) is called "Anne"- what's that about?! You can't just go changing names like that. Also John in the French bible is Jean and James in the Bible is Jacques. It makes me wonder how close "Hannah" is to what they said back in the day. Guess how they spell Psalms though? .....PSAUMES! I really hope that for someone reading this, this comes up in a pub quiz or as the final question on a tv gameshow and you will millions all because you've read my blog. French spellings of Bible books is a common topic on pub quiz's, right?

While it is a nice novelty to be the good one in the class, I do think it's slightly unfair on the people who have to learn a whole new alphabet. I do have the advantage of GCSE French and the privilege of having the money to do some online lessons before I arrived. We had to go round and say why we came here and what we like about France, and some of the them mentioned fleeing war and that they loved the freedom of France. I felt bad to say I just moved here for fun to enjoy a wider variety of cheese.

The teacher also speaks Spanish (and a little bit of English), she was saying how English is hard though and gave the example of the work "knife" and said how this was a stupid way to spell it. Which gave me the opportunity to explain everything that it stupid about French (in French). 

For example, time. I've learnt time before, but it's only this week I noticed when French people answer the question, "what time is it?" they don't say, "it's 10 O'clock." They say, "he is 10 O'clock." Time is a man. 

There are many stupid examples of the masculine feminine thing being ridiculous, I'm sure I've mentioned before that the French word for vagina is masculine. 

At one point we were learning about household jobs. She taught us the word for "washing" and "stain" and "clean" and "dirty." She has to teach all this though mime and explaining in French because we all speak different languages. When I worked out she was explaining the word "dirty" I said it out loud in English, because sometimes it helps the Afghans and then she said, "oh? like dirty dancing?" and then I had to explain what "dirty" in the dirty dancing sense means in French, which is always fun.

I think the boys French is coming along, they understand a lot now and are starting to say short sentences.

It was Percy's birthday yesterday, so I'm going to write about that in its own blog.