First Day of School

[MerryBerryMoose]

1 down 179 more days to go.

I'm going to copy and paste from a blog I wrote...because I don't have much time. Home work already >.<

Good evening!!!!! I am back from school. Shoot, I hate the school bus a lot. The drive, who was this old woman, missed my house stop. I shot out of my seat and said "Excuse me you missed my stop!" So the woman SLAMS on the breaks. And then yells at me for not telling her. But I mean, she's the driver and has a list of WHERE THE STOPS ARE. Come on. So now I was instructed to remind her. And I was thinking "No, YOU are the bus driver, YOU need to know where my stop is."

Other than that my day was enjoyable...I didn't get lost, which is good. But I was almost late to one class >.< And when people asked if I had a talent or unique thing about me and I said well I am learning Japanese and can speak to an understandable degree in BASIC conversation (name, likes/dislikes, basic verbs ect) they were like O_o "COOL!!!!!!" This one jock kid (jock=boy who plays lots of sports and isn't too smart) goes "Say something in Japanese!!!!!" So to humor him I spit out,

"Konnichi wa. Watashi wa Gabby desu. Hajimemashi-te. Yoroshiku onegai. Ummm... fuzakenai deyo. (I learned that last sentance from a book so I am not sure how accurate that is...but it basically translates to "Stop acting like a ****)" And he was like "Cool." All I could think of was I kinda insulted you and yeah....you could really care less. It was rather amusing. And during my lunch, I had this creepy kid nanpa (hit on) me. I mean he wouldn't leave me alone and kept trying to cop a feel. So I screamed as loud as I could "tousakusha!!!!! YOU PERVERT!!!!!!" And yes, I screamed in Japanese too. Which got peoples attention. And then he FINALLY left me alone. Gosh. Maybe I sould do that more often to people who try stupid stuff like that.

All in all it was a hard but good day.
And I get to do it all again tomorrow.


--gabby

[Berkshire Road]

Oh, I'm sorry, I just had to laugh when I read your post. It brought back such intense memories of my high school days, which were divided between Lyon, France, and New Jersey.

I love your use of Japanese. Someone challenged my daughter to say something in French -- she understands a lot but she is usually pretty inhibited about speaking, I will speak to her in French and she responds in English. But anyway, this kid was just ragging on her and saying she was lying, she didn't know any French, etc. So he said, "Just say anything in French!" So she popped out with, "Shut the h*ll up, you jerk," in perfect French. And the boy was like, "Oh, cool."

This is still middle school. I can't even imagine what high school will be like for her. I really enjoy your posts because they're well written and thoughtful, but also because they sort of give me a window into the high school world, 21st century style.

[MerryBerryMoose]

Oh, I'm sorry, I just had to laugh when I read your post. It brought back such intense memories of my high school days, which were divided between Lyon, France, and New Jersey.

I love your use of Japanese. Someone challenged my daughter to say something in French -- she understands a lot but she is usually pretty inhibited about speaking, I will speak to her in French and she responds in English. But anyway, this kid was just ragging on her and saying she was lying, she didn't know any French, etc. So he said, "Just say anything in French!" So she popped out with, "Shut the h*ll up, you jerk," in perfect French. And the boy was like, "Oh, cool."

This is still middle school. I can't even imagine what high school will be like for her. I really enjoy your posts because they're well written and thoughtful, but also because they sort of give me a window into the high school world, 21st century style.

It's kind of amusing at how...weird...highschool is now. I'm sure your daughter will do fine in highschool when she goes. My HS is HUGE. I think my graduating class had like 1300 kids. And then quadruple that and add maybe 100 kids and thats how many kids are in ONE school. My district has 3 middle schools, 2 intermediate schools, 2 primary schools, and 5 elementary schools. And only ONE high school. Way too big.

What was highschool in France like? Was it very different than schools in America?

[Berkshire Road]

My daughter will only have about 80 kids in her graduating class, which also has its downside. But overall, we're happy about that.

Okay, France... Well, the educational system over there is completely different. After what would be equivalent to maybe 6th grade, they have regular tests and kids who aren't making it academically get placed in something like a vo-tech, learning a trade. When you're high school age, you have to pick a track to follow, and then you take all the courses for that track, no deviations. The tracks are like college majors. You might take history-geography, or one of the math-science options, or languages and (oh, I forget what goes with languages, LOL). It's hard to switch from one program to another once you've started.

Then there is nothing like graduation, there is no ceremony at all. Students who choose to, can sit for the Baccalaureate exam. If you get the "bac" you can enter pretty much any public university. If you want to go to one of the specialized universities you have to put together a kind of portfolio application.

It's a national education system so there are no local differences, except school size. Of course there are also Catholic schools, and some private schools -- not a lot of those, but for example, there's a private American School in Paris.

My youngest friend currently in France is 21. She reports that the standards for all of the exams including the bac, are dropping a lot. I had been reading about that, anyway. The tests used to be very rigorous, and at the end of each school year, all the teachers for one student would have a conference, looking over the student's records and discussing their progress. All your teachers had to agree, before you could be passed to the next grade. There was a whole lot of repeating grades. There was barely any stigma attached to it because it was so common. I think they still have this system but the standards are easing up.

Well, that was a not-very-coherent rundown of the French educational system! Let's see, other differences -- well, when I was in school, we used to get a 2 hour lunch break but we didn't finish classes until 5 pm. We also went to school Saturday mornings. Most schools even then were moving toward a shorter lunch and earlier dismissal time. I just remember walking home in the dark, a lot. Otherwise, kids are kids. We gossiped, we dated, we listened to whatever music was cool at any given time, we worried about our figures and our clothes... just universal adolescent stuff, I think.

Anyway, I was in a special situation because we moved back and forth, so I was enrolled in a private school in New Jersey, and the public school in France made special accomodations for me to take classes similar to the program I'd need in the U.S. I was basically there in 10th grade and 12th grade (we had lived there earlier, when I was a child, but it didn't matter then. We had a lot more homework in elementary school than kids in the US did, although now American kids get much more than they used to.) So, the NJ school let me transfer all credits, and so I graduated from there and did not sit for the bac (I had already been accepted to the University I wanted, in the US, so I chose to go back to NJ at the end of senior year and join in all the partying, and walk in the graduation with my class). We've all pretty much stayed in the US after that, except for visits.

I have always been an American citizen, and I am happy with that. Even so, I still think in French and dream in it. I never want to forget the language or the life that I lived there. This past June I went to Paris for a long weekend with my husband, and I was just smiling non-stop from the time we got off the plane until the time we got back to NY.

Wow, you probably weren't expecting a novel! If you've made it this far, well, that's what you get for asking such an open-ended question!

OH, I almost forgot to mention one key difference, very important to us IC'ers: In the French school, all the bathrooms were co-ed!