After a brief transitional period during my freshman year, high school became a liberating and confidence boosting experience. I know what you're thinking. High school? Confidence building? Liberating? None of those adjectives seem to fit with the classic American description of four years of brutal humiliation, mountainous piles of homework and a constant fear of being judged by those much less intelligent and infinitely more attractive than you. However I assure you my tenure at Enloe High School was anything but unbearable. I had spent the previous three years undergoing all of the tortures mentioned above at the local middle school in my upper middle class, conservative North Carolina neighborhood, and to finally be free of taunts about my sexuality and liberal political view points was the greatest graduation present I could have received. I was among my own kind, forward thinkers, musicians, non suicidal creative writers. People who could name senators and state representatives from above the Mason Dixon Line. It was amazing.
While I briefly stumbled in honors freshman English (garnering a C for a quarter grade, a personal low), I gained my footing with ease, and while I wasn't creating life long friendships with kids in my class, for the first time in my life no one was going out of their way to be my enemy. As far as I was concerned, flying under the radar was the perfect position to have, as it didn't cast me in to one particular social group. Speaking of which, cliques were something that were conspicuous at my school only by their absence. It was remarkable to see the poorly dressed, socially awkward, future Ivy League students mingle with the beautiful people (many of whom incidentally also went on to world class universities, most notably the head cheerleader now attending Columbia) without fear of retribution. However, like all high schools, or institutions of learning in general, certain types of people banded together based on a number of different factors. At Enloe, it was generally your academic interests that drew you into a particular circle. The drama kids were close, as were the super geniuses who were taking college level calculus their freshmen and sophomore years. Not being terribly mathematically inclined and having sworn off theater after two grueling middle school plays, I opted to simply remain unnoticed.
This strategy was quite successful, until I discovered French. I had already attended French immersion summer camp for three years before beginning high school instruction, but as impressive as that may sound it gave me only a marginal advantage over my peers. Much to my delight, French turned out to be not only a joy to learn, but also absurdly easy to master. In no time at all I had committed all the vocabulary and verb tenses to memory and had secured my spot at the head of the class. Nothing could phase me. I was an unstoppable francophone machine.
Sophomore year I encountered what would later prove to be a formidable opponent in my quest to become Supreme French Master of Enloe High School. Her name was Madame Popescu, my new French teacher, and she conducted her class with the ruthless efficiency she learned during her tenure as a second lieutenant in the Communist Romanian army. She was a woman not easily intimidated, having used her status as Romania's premier opera singer to escape the Soviet Block and make her way to America by way of an Italian refugee camp. Upon arrival in New York, she worked her way up through the ranks of the hospitality industry, gained her citizenship and eventually settled in North Carolina, where she still teaches high school French with a fervor bordering on obsession. Needless to say I loved her.
Finally I had found someone who could push me academically, teach me things about French I didn't know, things that would require extensive study to decipher and use skillfully in conversation. French I was simply a warm up, a teaser to attract students to the upper echelons of the most beautiful language humanity has ever known. To my chagrin, I was quite mistaken. Vocabulary lists, stem and ending tenses, direct and indirect object pronouns; these were things with which I was unfamiliar to be sure but required only one 40 minute class period to commit to my wheel house. I was conflicted. On the one hand, I managed to maintain my status of top of the class, on the other, none of the material challenged me academically. My only source of inspiration to continue with French came from my annual excursions to Lac du Bois, where everyday I ate, slept and breathed the French language. I ended sophomore year satisfied to know how to use the imperfect and future simple tenses, but anxious to tackle even more complex grammar.
Enter French III. My teacher this year, the same sweet lady who had taught French I my freshman year (and incidentally a counselor at Lac du Bois) was genuinely goodhearted and certainly capable, but lacked the confidence and authority to control a class of high school students less than ten years her junior. However, despite her insecurities, she finally managed to introduce me to material with which I struggled. The conditional and subjunctive tenses, things which still give me a hard time two years later, made their first appearances in my life that year. Coupled with her policy of teaching entirely in French whenever possible (something I was astounded Popescu hadn't done the previous year), I began to cultivate a new found passion which I only believed possible during summer. This lasted throughout the majority of the year, the majority of which I spent worrying that my Tunisian friend and native French speaker would overtake my position as top of the French class. Thankfully his apathy and inexplicably numerous absences kept my reputation intact. I ended junior year more confident than ever in my speaking abilities and excited to start a month long intensive French course in order to bypass French IV and place directly into AP French, the final battle in my four year conquest of francophone dominance.
The summer program was everything I hoped it would be and more. It validated my beliefs in my speaking and comprehension abilities and gave me a firm grounding in the tricky, often misunderstood subjunctive and literary tenses. Throughout all this, I became close with several of my classmates who remain my best friends, even now that we are spread across three different countries, two continents and opposing hemispheres. Upon my return from camp, I began to gear up for the final year of high school, a year jam packed with college applications and standardized tests. Unfortunately, I encountered a problem when attempting to register for AP French. It seems that by her exacting standards, Popescu had deemed a solid month of French immersion study inadequate for entrance into her AP level class. Having been her most accomplished student two years previously, I was somewhat hurt that she had such little faith in my abilities. Thus, after many emails and countless complaints, I was forced to concede and register for French IV, rejoining my classmates whose lack of determination and inability to pronounce complex phonemes had driven me insane the previous year (I must note here that I harbor no ill will towards anyone in from my high school French classes. They are all lovely people, but it was clear that their enrollment in French amounted to no more than a halfhearted desire to sound sophisticated and a need for a foreign language credit on their transcripts).
They could not compete. I struck them down, test after test, quiz after quiz, one discussion question after another. I took my prodigious skill and used it to spearhead a fervent campaign to guilt Madame into apologizing for not having placed me in AP French. I answered her questions fluently, with a decent Parisian accent which by comparison appeared to be that of a native speaker. My compositions on the French tests were twice as long as necessary and deliberately employed the use of tenses in which others dare not dabble. My scores reflected it. I never scored below %98 on a vocabulary quiz (often having learned it the period before) and my test average was a %95. I felt vindicated. I had no competition, save one girl who sat across from me, desperate to prove herself. I had to admit, she was good. She spoke passable French, was eager to learn more, and even once outscored me on a unit test. She was the only person in the class who could have posed a threat to my sterling reputation, but thankfully my prowess far outstripped her own, and she seemed content with the fact that she could impress the other students even if she wasn't top of the class.
As the year progressed, we moved on to what many feared would be their downfall. Research papers. More specifically, research papers written entirely in French about French history and influential monarchs and authors therein. The requirements were insultingly simple. Two pages double spaced, with a minimum of three sources. I finished the first one in an hour, scanned it once for errors, and turned it in the next day. %93. I even had to shrink the margins to keep my paper at the two page maximum. The second paper followed in a similar fashion. %95. I was untouchable. I ruled the course with an iron fist, and no one could dare oppose me. I ended high school with what was undoubtedly the best academic French record for an anglophone the school had ever seen. To cap it all off, I had independently registered to take the AP French Exam, which only five people from the actual AP class had felt brave enough to take, and scored a 4. I had done it. I had shown Madame, and now I was off to greater things, following my talents and desires to a city and university I knew could stimulate me academically. I turned out to be right, but not in the way I expected.
I got to Montreal thinking I would finally be surrounded by people with similar intellectual fortitude, young men and women with whom I could have a conversation about Camus' L'Etranger or the Socialist movement in France in the 1980's. What I discovered was not only could they indeed speak with authority on these subjects, but that their knowledge about francophone culture and command of the French language far outstripped my own.
It began with a placement test. In order to pursue my dream of becoming a French major I first had to verify my skills via an objective test designed to assess my abilities. So one morning I went to the language lab, sat through an hour and a half of the same material which I had put up with in high school, and emerged to find that I not only was I too advanced for any French as a second language class, but that I had taken the wrong test entirely. I rebounded quickly and paid a visit to the headquarters of inept bureaucracy, the French Language and Literature Department.There they told me that in order to place into the Department, I had to sit two placement tests, one to assess my grammar, the other my skills in translation. I failed both. How terrible my scores were, I cannot say. All I know is that I was shunted into an intensive "Advanced Grammar" course designed to pull me out of the mire of mediocrity, and what basically amounted to an introduction in translation.
While I have managed to keep in step with my introduction to translation class (Stylistique Comparee being its official title), I struggle with grammar. For the first time in my life I received a failing grade on a French test, forcing me to accept that perhaps public schools in the American south are not bastions of lingual brilliance. I subsequently devoted hours studying for the following examination, with my intense effort garnering me a B. It has been the most humbling experience of my life, and I can say that with complete sincerity.
The majority of students in my classes are native speakers, and even the anglophones have had at least nine years of French study, much of it being in immersion. While I still take pride in my abilities to speak, read and write in French, my two and a half months in Montreal have shown me that a swollen ego and high opinion of yourself will only get you as far as the next smartest person.
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