and so is the story of the long forgotten blog. and yes laziness is a large part too. in fact, the only reason i’m here now is because my domain expired which reminded me i had a blog in the first place. in order to ease the guilt of the $17.99 purchase to renew it for another year, i decided i should at least give it a little shout out. so hello. and goodbye.

I have classes of up to 22 students. Most classes are 12-15 students. About half can’t speak English. Worse yet, I was told to NOT let them know I speak French so that they’d be forced to speak English. Well, after about 4 weeks of speaking like a drunk robot (you know, slurring and mechanically unnatural – or worse yet pronouncing words like a French person) I finally gave up and started speaking in French to help them understand when they were lost. Not only did this help my rapport with them, but it made them more comfortable to make blunders in English since I did it all the time in French. However, while for some it worked, I do still have groups that are just awful to work with. There are actually some that I’ve considered meeting with the principal about to ask if I can not teach them anymore. The way I see it is that most (about 9 out of 12) classes really enjoy their time with me, learn from the classes I give, participate to their relative ability, and look forward to seeing me. The other 3 classes scowl at me and talk the whole time. When called on they stare at me and speak French. I tried playing games with them to warm up to them and show that I’m not “bad teacher,” but they got so bad I had to become bad teacher (and because the teacher next door complained about their noise making).  So I’ve began taking carnets* when necessary, but I don’t actually know what to write in them so I always give them back at the end with a “next time I am writing in it!” warning.

(*a carnet is a sort of disciplinary booklet that students are required to carry around. It gets checked by the administration on a regular basis. Too many notes and you will be suspended or expelled.)

I guess I don’t really have any advice to give you, just thought I’d let you know you are not alone in your frustrations! Sometimes those 55 minutes are the most unbearable minutes of my life. I am not a confrontational person so reprimanding students has been hard. The other day two of my students started asking me what right I had to reprimand them when I wasn’t even a real teacher. You have no idea I mad I got! And for what reason did the confrontation happen? They were watching Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech with French subtitles and put their heads on their desks. When I told them they HAD to watch it they said “but I’m not interested.” I’m not interested? You’ve got to be kidding me! It felt borderline racist.

Sorry to vent. Sometimes it’s just hard to believe people can raise such annoying and disrespectful children!

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This story is true. But I do have many classes that I absolutely adore, especially when I’m trying to get 15 year old girls to figure out if women receive equal treatment to men. Silly girls. If they don’t listen now, they’ll learn once they grow up.

this list is a response to the beginning of my fourth month living in a foreign country. i guarantee the equivalent will be formed after four months of living back home…

That said, I do feel like it’s due time for a bit of an update, a few remarks, and some pointed tips for personal improvement (mine and others).

1. To the high school teachers of France – If you decide to go on strike and cancel your classes – which in turn means my classes – please inform me before I’ve taken the half hour bus ride to school.  And if that is not possible please – this is for you Mr. Secretary of the school – don’t tell me a teacher will be there for class when she wont be. I’m all for striking and political dissent, but I don’t like being at school for five hours when I could have been there for only one.  God created email and cell phones for a reason – use them!

2. I didn’t join couchsurfing.org as a dating service, so please stop writing me and asking me to come stay with you in Paris. I won’t.

3. Always keep one eye on the ground when walking. This is the only sure measure against unwittingly stepping in an enormous wet dog turd. Which leads me to 4…

4. Please pick your dog turds up after they have dispensed them. Really gross things happen when you don’t.

5. Please stop making everything so much cheaper for those who are 25 and under. Just because I’m aging doesn’t mean I’m rich. Adults are children too and deserve 50% off train fares. Besides, everyone tells me I look 20, shouldn’t that count for something? The new policy should be like that off the OLCC: everyone who looks 36 or younger gets carded, or in this case, the discount.

6. Perhaps rulers should be reinstated in classrooms as a form of discipline. I’m not one to promote child abuse, but I’m beginning to think some teenagers could use a good whack on the head here and there to set them straight.

7. White trash French people exist and they all shop at the same discount super market. More on this subject later…

8. Whoever told me (that would you Madame High School French Teacher) that French people don’t get drunk like Americans has never walked in the neighborhood of bars on an early Sunday morning and counted vomit splats.  No it’s not just pre, post, and current American fratority members that drink until they purge their dinner.

I recently taught my students about American politics. This included a simple 16 question quiz to determine their imaginary American political affiliation. Despite the fact it seems nearly all the students like Obama and haphazardly shout out “Yes we can!” during class, a whopping 20% are deep down McCain/Bush loving war mongers. I assume this is the part of the population that explains the near election of the neo fascist nationalist Le Pen as president in 2007.  Another 26% of students are what I have exacted as conservative democrats, though I think really they’re more like liberal republicans (I like ze guns, ze war, and ze marijuana! taxes? zey are too expeensif”).

Other findings follow.

1. Don’t assume 15 year olds are intelligent just because they’re French. Stupid people fill every nook and cranny of the earth, and that includes France. I just wasn’t prepared to have to explain to the kids why they don’t pay to see the doctor or to go to the hospital. I figured their 15 year old minds had figured out they lived in a socialist country where their taxes (or those of their parents) contribute to the collective good. Apparently I was wrong.

2. Not surprisingly most French teenagers are democrats. And for this I am grateful. Moreover, the older they get, the more liberal they become. I attribute this to their more highly developed mental facilities allowing them to reflect  intelligently when asked if the war in Iraq was a mistake.

3. A surprising number of French teenagers support the death penalty, which is illegal in France.

4. An even more surprising number think abortion should be illegal. (Can we say catholic?)

5. However, most agree that marijuana should be legal.  When asked why responses ranged from the infamous “Yes we can!” to “I like smoke ze marijuana” to “it make you fly.” After explaining that money spent jailing marijuana felons could be redirected to education, they seemed to like the idea because “maybe if Americans are smarter zey don’t smoke ze marijuana so much.” Touché.

6. Students are up in the air on being gay. Half think gay marriage should be legal, a quarter say civil unions are fine but not marriage, and a quarter say a lesbian is just a woman lost without a man and that gay men are unnatural. (These are some of the same kids who need to feel the corrective sting of my wooden – or maybe metal – ruler).

7. Studies find the generally more annoying and disobedient the student is the more likely he or she is to be a republican.  Once again rulers come into play here. Rulers = a good excuse to beat a republican.

And that is that. This is France.

1. universal health care – this is obvious to anyone with an ounce of intelligence on their shoulders and the french think we are insane for not having it. and they are right.
2. affordable wine – we produce some good wine in america, however if you want to buy anything under $10 you run the risk of having to pour it down the sink along with all its fake oak fruity full bodied american flavors. however a recent 3,50 euro beaujolais villages kicked some serious cheap wine ass.
3. cheese – need i say more?
4. trains – they aren’t perfect and if you want to get from rural village in region a to rural village in region b it can take forever, but mostly they are fast, cheap, and environmentally friendly.
5. free education through doctorates degrees
6. super market meat departments that offer it all – pigs brains, cow tongue, veal liver, whole rabbits with eyeballs and everything. i may not be interested in eating any of these and prefer my rabbits to appear as unbunny like as possible, but i like to know that someone is making use of them. can you imagine a safeway with dead bunnies in it? i can’t…

and on the contrary, here are a few things france should emulate from america:

1. driving behavior – please slow down french drivers. unless your grandmother is dying in the hospital there is no reason to be in such a hurry.
2. international wine selections – this is one thing we do right with wine – we sell it from countries all over the world. you can buy american wine in france, however the only american wine i have seen in chaumont (aside from the bottle of oregon pinot noir i brought with me) is gallo chardonnay. what’s worse? the situation isn’t much brighter for closer international selections. chianti? gruner? rioja? nope. how about wines from the rhine in germany that i’m only a few hours away from? nope. in all fairness i am comparing a city of over 1 million people to a town of under 30,000, though i do hear american wine is hard to come by even in paris…
3. service in restaurants – it hardly exists here. i don’t like the overly attentive i-want-to-be-your-best-friend american style service, but i also don’t like being ignored when i want another drink.
4. milk/half and half – how can they do cheese so right and milk so wrong? warm shelved boxed milk is a travesty to the poor dairy cows that produced it. please stop at once.
5. mexican food – i can’t get no satisfaction…
6. portland oregon – i still love you.

it really is a fascinating difference between america and france. certainly we close some things down on sunday, like the post office – so as to keep people from going postal i imagine – and government branches and banks (we don’t want disgruntled overworked employees becoming unpatriotic or worse yet finagling our financial system). but closing down everything? can you imagine how america’s gdp would suffer if we closed the malls, the walmarts, and all the grocery stores? what would americans do if they couldn’t spend their free time wasting money at corporate chains on products they don’t need made in impoverished countries by underpaid workers!? quelle horreur… (to note, i will say the french do have this behavior as well, just not on sundays…)

but really, sundays in france are quite different. most sundays are very quiet and peaceful and for me involve either a certain degree of gastronomic creativity or outright fasting. i’m very bad at planning meals in advance and so a day without a trip to the grocery store is a rarity in my life. yesterday was sunday. too lazy on saturday to go to the market, i planned on a very dull and sober dinner of either rice and carrots or pasta and sauce. however, what i didn’t plan on was free wine, donkey petting, live caged poultry, and french folk music. such are some of the many wonderful surprises one stumbles up on living in france!

yesterday turned out to be the annual autumn artisans market where you could buy handmade local wool products (itchy sweater anyone?), sample bison terrine and pigeon paté (raised proper, made proper, tasted proper), and, god bless france, drink free wine -all to the tune of french singing and accordions. i didn’t actually know the market was going on, but my first clue was when i was walking home from chaumont’s fabulous 19th century viaduct and spotted a horse drawn carriage slowing traffic as it traversed a roundabout. now chaumont is a small town and the haute marne is indeed a rural place, but we are not quite that behind in transportation options.

i eventually made my way to the town center where we hold our wednesday and saturday farmers market. it was there that i spotted a large crowd of mostly children oohing and awing over two rather annoyed looking donkeys dressed in some sort of traditional french animal attire that resembled crocheted donkey ponchos. next to the donkeys were potted flowers and leafy vegetables for sale and on the other side of the outdoor terrace was my favorite: live caged fowl and poultry for sale. i’m not certain if these animals were for immediate consumption, home farming, eggs, or other uses that only the french could imagine, but moms with strollers, young men out of place, old men with canes and hobbling old wives meandered about glaring into the cages of the poor frightened birds and occasionally daring to stick their finger in. the best of it was the old fat lady who continuously said “cock a doodle do” (which is actually “cocorico” in french) to every bird she stopped at, even if it was a pigeon, a duck, or some other unidentifiable bird oddity.

once inside the market there were vendor booths everywhere. you could buy local honey and syrups in every flavor, black currant liquour made according to their grandmothers recipe from the early 1900’s, hats, scarves, candy and cookies, and all hand made within proximity to the haute-marne. you could even buy our regionally made belgian style beer called la choue from the keg to drink on the spot or in bottles to take home. and while the bison terrine and pigeon paté were both fascinating and disturbing in appearance, it was the regional winemakers that piqued my interest. it took me wondering around a bit and standing intently at booths before i got up the nerve to ask for a taste. unlike in america, where you would be offered a taste upon approaching and looking interested, in france the custom seems to be to ignore as much as possible. for as long as i would stand at their booth looking at their wines, pamphlets, and having a staring contest with their sample glasses not once was i offered a taste. eventually i gave up hope that they would ever just pour me some and hand it to me, and finally i made eye contact with the kind lady and asked her if i could taste her champagne. she cordially poured me a taste of delicious haute-marne brut followed by a taste of the brut reserve. both were outstanding. at 12-14 euros a bottle these were by far some of the best champagne values i’ve ever had, or even imagined existed. they were supple, perfectly balanced, toasty and wonderful. on top of that they were made nearby from a small producer probably not even heard of outside the region. sure champagne of the haute-marne doesn’t have all the flash, glamour, and advertisements with anorexic super models the grand marques of reims and epernay have, but it has something large world renowned wineries often lack: heart.

i finished my tasting and as i was buying a bottle of deliciously affordable champagne the couple standing next to me began to inquire about my camera. was it good, how was the lens, did it need to have such a wide angled lens, and should he buy one. responding in foreigners french prompted the question “with such a big camera and an accent you must be a journalist!” “no, not a journalist, just an english language assistant with a big camera” i replied. i then paid for my champagne, thanked the lady, said good day to the couple, and left in search of more wine samples. i eventually was overwhelmed the crowd, the need to ask for samples, and got hungry and so i made my way home to make my uninspired sunday dinner and resist the temptation to open the champagne i bought. fortunately i did resist, and although the pasta was a bit bland, the sunday itself was good and not bland at all…