"What’s my age again?"
~Blink 182

I forgot how much I love middle-schoolers. Every time I say that, there are one of two reactions that immediately follow: 1) you’re lying, or b) then why in the world aren’t you going to be a teacher?
And the answers are as follows: No, I am not lying– I love them. And why am I not a teacher? Because think about it– I don’t care who you are, when you were in middle school, were you nice to your teachers? I mean, honestly, like nice to them. Because I was a major hardcore good girl back then, and I was never rude to mine– but I kind of just tolerated them at best, because it’s way too important to be cool when you are 13, and the number one way to be not cool is to hang out too much with your teacher. So if you actually like middle-schoolers, teaching is not it for you. What IS it, however, is working at camp. Or tutoring in another language. Or babysitting extensively.
Fabrice, the kid I help with his English, is awesome. I think maybe it’s just that all French kids are extremely well-behaved, but I don’t want to detract from his coolness by crediting it to the culture, so I will still say that the kid is amazing. His parents make him sit through an hour and a half a week being tutored in English by a 21-year-old American who acts like a 13-year-old and talks like a 7-year-old, and he takes it like a champ. I know it must drive him crazy to have to do all that extra grammar work, but he never complains or acts bored... though when I was his age, if I had had a 21-year-old Spanish guy show up at my house once a week to teach me Spanish– the language I was learning at the time– you can bet I’d have paid attention. But I have no idea how to make this stuff interesting– if I were explaining it in English, I could, but I’ve got to explain it all in French, so there go all my little games and tricks and mnemonic (I just almost spelled that pneumonic. Which wouldn’t be weird unless you know what a freak I am when it comes to spelling things) devices. I came unbelievably close to teaching him the being verbs song today as a reminder of how to conjugate the verb "to be" in all kinds of tenses. But then I started thinking about it, and I hated that stupid song when I learned it at the age of 9, so what’s to make me think this kid, at the age of 11, and in another language, is going to be helped by it. I think part of the problem is that he doesn’t LOOK 11– he looks all of 9, which probably has something to do with diet and exercise and amount of sleep versus length of lunch break and hormones in beef and the fact that he walks to school, but I thus can’t get it through my head that this kid would be in the middle of being a Great Escape camper, or a Junior Conference kid; he just seems so much... I don’t know, more educated, which is odd, because he can barely formulate a sentence in my language.
Today I was writing his mom a note and I had to ask him how to spell "Bonne Vacances" (Have a good vacation), and the kid explained it and when I thanked him and told him he teaches me better than I teach him, he said, "Oh, it’s ok, it’s actually an exception to the rule, see, because since vacances is plural, "bonne" ought to be too, but it’s not, so you just have to memorize it." All in French, of course, but still...
When we do the exercises in his grammar book, I have to stop him all the time and make sure he understands the words in the sentences– "Tu comprends ruler?" "You understand what a ruler is?"
"Yes, like a paper towel," he responds, in French.
"No, wait..." and then it’s my turn to explain what a ruler is, but I don’t know the word in French, so what does poor Fabrice get? "Ruler c’est la chose qu’on utilise pour mesurer quelque chose...?"
"A ruler is the thing you use to measure something..."
"A meter?"
"No... the... stick thing?"
"Ahhhh, a regle!" But the thing is that we never actually know if he understands properly, because since I don’t know the word I am trying to explain, and he doesn’t know the word either, we just kind of rely on each other... It’s rather efficient...
Today we read a sentence about a tie, and I asked him if he knew the word, and he said no, so I said, "You know, it’s the thing men wear around their neck..." and he said "A briefcase?" in French.
He was reading a story to me about a cat, and he pronounced it "kate." And I have babysat 5 year olds learning to read, so I know the drill, and I said, without thinking about it, "Wait, what is that word?" And he repeated "Kate" slightly louder in case I hadn’t heard the first time. So I said, in a fit of Americanness fit to kill, "No, sound it out, babe."
Sound it out.
As though sounding it out is going to help this kid. As though he even knows what "sound" as a verb means. (Which, by the way, is a completely weird use for the word.) It’s not like he’s learning what sound the letter "a" makes for the first time in his life. You can’t sound out words in another language, because you revert to the pronunciation of YOUR language, and it is just useless. (Except in the case of Spanish, which I miss sometimes for precisely that reason.)
I always thought I could never be a grammar teacher because it is so dry, but this kid makes it amazing.
Monday night I went to my friend Laura’s apartment to hang out... we lounged around at her place in Chinatown for awhile and then decided we ought to go get dinner– Sushi! We both like fake sushi– the kind with fake crab instead of actual raw fish– and since she lives in Chinatown, we decided it must be good, right? So we walk into this fancy sushi bar and order a plate of california maki to share...
And the lady says, "Saumon? Ok!" "Salmon? Alright!"
So I stop her and say, "No, not salmon– ONLY California maki."
And she nods knowingly and says, "Right! Salmon ONLY!" and turns to walk away so quickly I don’t get a chance to stop her again. But two minutes later she walks by and I stop her, at Laura’s insistence (since not only do neither of us actually LIKE raw salmon, but it’s also not really the kind of place I want to be eating raw fish from anyway...), and say "Wait, we want–" and she interrupts with "Salmon! You want salmon!" And I say "No no, no salmon– we want CALIFORNIA maki– with... with..." and here I forgot the word for crab (I actually know the word for fake crab meat in french, file that under questions that may someday win me a million dollars on Final Jeopardy.). BUT I forgot the word for crab, so I look to Laura, hoping she can fill in the blank, but she has no idea what I am trying to say, so she says "Soy sauce?"
And the lady goes, "Ok, ok, shared maki with soy sauce!" And Laura, more optimistic than I, says, "Wow, that was complicated..." as I am trying to decide what we are actually going to get.
And, sure enough, the lady brings us a giant plate of, like, a million salmon makis, and TWO bottles of soy sauce, since we clearly wanted it so bad. Excellent. We picked the salmon out, one at a time, of each and every maki and ate them plain... but it’s the kind of place that they may have just saved our heap of salmon for the next customer.
AND both of the soy sauces they brought for us were soia sucrée. I don’t know how to explain this... I eat sushi a lot in the US and have never seen this stuff, but everyone here loves it. It LOOKS like soy sauce, but it’s thicker, like if you mixed maple syrup with regular soy sauce, and it’s... SWEET. How weird is that? But it’s good. And at sushi places here (real upscale ones, not places where they don’t know the difference between fake crab and real salmon), you always eat the sweet soy sauce with sushi– the salty kind is only for chicken and rice and other kinds of meat. Maybe it’s a European invention, the way a lot of things at Taco Bell are American inventions... or maybe it’s some kind of legit Asian dietary staple that I was just never aware of... but either way, I’m glad I discovered it.
Last night I went to see Molière’s Malade Imaginaire at the Comedie Française with my program. The Comedie is this place where they put on– you guessed it– comedies. It was built in 1690, across the street from the Louvre back in the day when the king lived at the Louvre, so that it was handy for him. The building is beautiful; I got there early on purpose, and although my seat kind of sucked (it required a handheld O2 tank to get there), it ended up being ok because it just put me closer to the ceiling, which was gorgeous. Remember my passion for Beauty and the Beast? Think ballroom scene in Beast’s palace. Cherubs and angels frolicking in the clouds, and in the movie they actually frolic in time with the music, while looking down placidly at Belle and Beast. The chandelier too was straight out of the movie, and although the ceiling painting was dated 1913, it was still gorgeous.
The play itself was... good. (The title, translated, means "The Imaginary Disease.") A lot of the humor in it was puns, and the gag of the whole thing was how the main character was dying but still talked at top speed all the time... so it was pretty hard to understand, but it was still funny.
But it had this weird personification of death through the whole thing, as a crowd of masked people in those really terrifying tall Art Nouveau hats... you know the ones? Anyway, I have this HUGE inexplicable fear of people in those kind of outfits, and, completely separately, an even bigger fear of people in masks pointing at me. Actually, neither of these are inexplicable... I know exactly where each one came from, but that doesn’t make them any less legit. And death in the play was a crowd of people in those masks that came out chanting to eerie music, and then pointed at the main character.
I almost peed my pants. I mentioned this fear to someone afterward and they looked at me like I was crazy. Which made me start thinking of things that really freak me out, and I suppose they are kind of weird...
Parking garages. Burkas. People in masks pointing at me. Masquerade masks with fake noses. Those tall hats. Roaches. Cave crickets. The Lady in White (a monster that no one really understands who is reputed to live in the cabin I spent all summer in and was seen there by more than one staffer in years past– AND I totally saw her one night last August). Whippoorwill John, but only before dawn.
That’s kind of an exhaustive list, which is why it seems so long. But nevertheless, the point is that I came home and, quite literally, dreamed about people in masks in my room chanting around my bed and woke up in a cold sweat. So much for the comedic effect, I guess.
In other news, I went and talked to the people in charge of my program about getting out of this architectural design class– I have no experience in this, and not only that, but it’s also not even an intro level class– it’s a third year class. It’s really not my fault; the course description mentioned nothing about designing things. Anyway, I went to the office to talk to them about my difficulties, and this is what they said to me: "You know, the Pantheon is just around the corner from here– you could draw that! There are always students sitting outside of it with their easels and pencils!"
Are you kidding me? I got told three times last week that my plan of the plain classroom we were sitting in was wrong, and all they can tell me is to go draw the freaking Pantheon? I don’t have a picture of the Pantheon to put here, but suffice it to say this: Pantheon means, like, "all the gods" or something, and this building encompasses all the architectural elements known to man. When I mentioned that perhaps the Pantheon is a bit out of my league right now, they responded with "Well, Paris is the perfect city to take a design class in! There are monuments and fancy buildings everywhere!" I think they missed the point.
The next Le Corbusier,
B