Fresh

The other day, after reading what seemed like a thousand fairy tale picture books that I very wisely assigned French 3 (which has by far more students than any other level I teach), I gave my students some general feedback about what I read--things like don't forget accent marks, stay consistently in the past tense, and...please don't use Google Translate.

The last comment took up the most time of my feedback. My main piece of evidence was the massive quantities of grammar in the books they wrote that they have never in fact learned. I told them how I don't think Google Translate is evil or anything, but you need to know how it works and its limitations, and you need to consider your objectives when you choose a tool. For example, if your objective is to learn French, maybe the best tool isn't a translator that you just drop the story you wrote in English into.

(One student had this very ornately written story that I don't even think he wrote in English. I challenged him on it, and he fought back until I asked him to just tell me what a couple sentences of the book actually meant. And he couldn't.)

As part of trying to make my point about Google Translate, I showed them a video that put the lyrics of the theme song of The Fresh Prince of Bel Air into it over and over. I figured, being from the 80's, my students wouldn't be too familiar with this, so I played them the video of the actual thing first.

Boy was I wrong. I swear half of every class I showed this to sang along. Someone said that they were watching the show that morning as they got ready for school. One girl commented about how much she liked Will Smith's style in the show.

Of course. Of course they don't know how to tell time on an analog clock or have their own email addresses, but they know The Fresh Prince of Bel Air.

"You will."

Since I started teaching, I've thought about how I should write down some of the funny things that happen at work. If I'm going to start, I might as well share them.


The other day, a student told me how he has me for English next year. I looked at him, a little puzzled, and said, "I don't teach English."

"You will," he said. "You will."

***

I first heard about the artist Lorde on NPR--and, because of this, assumed her and her song "Royals" were pretty obscure. I loved the song, and I couldn't resist playing it during class the next day (even though it's not in French), prefacing it with something like, "I just found out about this new artist..." My students laughed at me right away and explained that the song had been in heavy rotation on the radio for quite awhile. I try to get my students to sing in French, and in this same class, there is a table with a couple of guys who really do sing. They sing loud and exaggerated and enjoy the humor of it (and of other situations). It's this same group of boys who, since the "Royals" day, will regularly sing the chorus of the song to me in falsetto.

A Long December...

At the end of another year, here's a quick look back on some of the things I did. During 2013, I...

• Drove around Ireland and Northern Ireland with a friend
• Picked up yoga
• Got an iPhone
• Spend the summer living in Provo
• Took a road trip to Disneyland with some friends
• Did some more work on a Master's degree
• Racked up some medical bills
• Started a new job that has definitely been a step up from the last one
• Started teaching AP French for the first time
• Got a black standard poodle puppy, Ditto (who I love!)

Loverly

I have a group of friends from elementary school, and we still get together. Our most recent hang-out happened this week, and one of us talked about bragging about having a group of friends from elementary school. I think it is brag-worthy.

I also think it's interesting to look at where we are in life (a few things have changed since third grade). So here's a figurative snapshot of where we are now:

Living in Utah: 3 of 4
Married: 2 of 4
Bachelor's degree: 4 of 4
Returned missionary: 2 of 4
Graduate degree: 1 of 4
Working in her field: 4 of 4 (Our respective fields being graphic design, fashion, international development, and foreign language education)
In or looking to transition to a new job in said field: 3 of 4
Living with parents: 2 of 4

And here's a literal snapshot:

Why? Because it's there.

This summer has been busy--after finishing the school year, I did two and a half weeks working at BYU's French Camp for high school students. As that was ending, I started the three grad classes that are taking up the bulk of my summer. I was looking forward to being a full-time student again for these eight weeks of classes. Completing nine grad credits in this amount of time, though, has also been immensely difficult. The work load and seat time is high, and I have found myself stretched and stressed.

Tonight, a friend asked me why I wanted to do grad school--the second time I've been asked this question in as many weeks. I gave the same answer tonight, the most simple one: "Because I haven't learned enough."

After, when I was driving home, I put on a podcast that turned out to be an episode of the TED Radio Hour called "To The Edge." The different segments of the podcast are posted here--interviews with a man who has walked to the North Pole, with a cave explorer whose expeditions can be over a month deep underground, a woman who has rowed alone across oceans, and a high-wire artist who crossed between the World Trade Center on a thin cable. The host kept referring to a famous interview with George Mallory. When asked why summit Mount Everest, Mallory simply answered, "Because it's there."

The podcast episode had such amazing stories: people, regular people, who have pushed themselves because for curiosity and for the joy of it. They reflected on how hard their pursuits were--and, in turn, that the harder the challenge, the greater the accomplishment of completing it. I found the stories so comforting and (though it is trite to say) inspirational. The summits and finish lines were reached, and because of that, lives were changed. Life was made better.

It's all about the niños

I've just made it home, totally exhausted, after French Fair Day. Each year, BYU hosts what I have heard rumors to be some of the largest foreign language fairs in the country for school kids. Students of Chinese, French, German, Japanese, Russian, and Spanish gather in different parts of campus to present skits, songs, and poems, compete in trivia and spelling competitions, and to speak the languages they are learning with thousands of other students from across northern Utah.

My day started at about 5:30 this morning when I got up to hurry to school so I could leave sub plans for the students who wouldn't be attending (I don't take my French I classes--they just get to stew in anticipation for next year while the rest of us take off). After that, the day was a rush of meeting times, permission forms, roll calls, bus rides, passing out handouts, reminders about schedules, digging for the right CD, final rehearsals, calls to the bus driver, and kid-rangling.

This was not my first French Fair experience. This was my second year with students, and I had volunteered as a helper for three years as a BYU student (in addition to one year at the Spanish Fair)--long days of listening to poetry or passing out pastries or checking passports. Even without my own students there, the French Fair days were exhausting.

Talking to my school's Chinese teacher on the bus ride back from the fair, I realized I wasn't the only one who was glad all the rehearsals, memorizing, and transportation arrangements were done for another year. My colleague had her own students to manage while she was at the Chinese fair, but had also been saddled with setting up and running the karaoke booth for the whole fair. During the bus ride, we also chatted about the exchange she's arranged for six years now between her students and a students at a school in Taiwan, as well as the video contest her students enter annually.

As we talked, I thought about the extra time she spends on these projects. If she's like me, like other foreign language teachers I know, like the BYU professors who organize the language fairs, like the college students who make it run, there isn't really anyone thanking her for doing it or noticing that she does. She doesn't get paid more for doing it all. Maybe that makes it all the more amazing that it happens.

One of those organizing BYU professors--of Spanish--sent out emails to the grad students of the department explaining how their help was expected at the language fair. "If you start to feel unmotivated, lethargic or frustrated," he wrote, "just remember, it's all about the niños!" On the bus ride today, I had a moment of such amazement about how many people had taken that to heart during the day. What an amazing thing had come together because of that: hours of preparing students, of careful organization, of listening to and encouraging these learners, of set-up and take-down--all of it fueled by not much more than some good hearts. As I was walking out of work this evening, another colleague stopped me and told me how she had overheard some of my students talking to each other in the hall about how much they had loved the French Fair. That made me want to think it's worth it.

From Pounds to Euros

Yesterday we saw a bit of Belfast in Northern Ireland. I thought about my family at Carrickfergus Castle...

...learned a bit about Northern Ireland's complicated past...

...then left Great Britain and the Pound to re-enter the Euro Zone. We spent the night at Cabra Castle. It was beautiful, but not the most pleasant night. The walls were very thin, and we got to hear most of the next door couple's raging argument at four in the morning. 

This morning, after a final look around the castle, we were off to some of Ireland's ancient sites. The "passage tombs" of Knowth and Newgrange were built before Stonehenge and Egypt's pyramids.

Our guide at Knowth, our first stop, was quite enthusiastic and friendly.

You can't walk in this site, but you can peak down the passage.

We got to Newgrange, and after our guide there told off a kid for making too much noise while standing on the gravel, Natalie dubbed him the "Newgrange Nazi." It is a spectacular place to visit, though. We got to go inside with our guide--where he was in his element. Overall, visiting the sites was an amazing experience.

After that, we drove off to the Hill of Tara. It was here the ancient high kings of Ireland were crowned. It was another cold day, but the sun was shining. It was absolutely beautiful up on the hill, walking among all the mysterious mounds and circles formed in the earth.