Update: week of August 16

Phew! So, I returned to Paris for 4 days of class. They put me back in the intermediate class where I had been before with the same teacher, Stephanie. This week, Stephanie had an assistant, a young woman whose name I never quite caught. She was pretty and nice, though not quite as pretty and nice as Stephanie. Stephanie is also a singer, creating very dramatic scenes on the stages of basement bars and clubs in central Paris. This means that she was fundamentally a performer, a nice quality in a teacher. The teaching philosophy at L'Atelier 9 is that students should never use dictionaries, but instead teachers act out the words that students don’t know. They believe that this will help us remember. So, Stephanie has performed for us extensive skits to show, for example, how one rendre visits a person (ah! Mon Coeur! – You don’t want a person circulating thru your blood stream as would happen if you visitered them), and in that case I actually do remember that the only thing you visiter is a place.

The assistant had none of these qualities. She was queit and for some reason her form of controlling the classroom was just annoying when Stephanie’s inspired devotion (in me anyway). I think that before a person can have a position of power over another person, they must earn that person's respect and admiration. I don’t know how one does that, but that’s what you need to do. The bottom line is that Stephanie is a really good teacher and this young woman was not. It makes me wonder if all teachers everywhere should be required to first be performing artists. The good news, for those of us who wish to learn, is that there are lots of teaching positions and very few are able to make a living performing.

The class included a middle-aged Dutch couple, 2 young Danish girls, a New Yorker (30?) with a penchant for performing himself and a French girlfriend, a young Australian girl, and an older Canadian woman. It was full. I realized, once again, that what I enjoy most is being with a group of people, working together. Stephanie is spending the month of September in Brazil, and I was relieved to learn that this assistant lady would not be her replacement.

The first couple days I was sure I was the strongest in the class. I understood more than the others and was able to ramble on and express myself with relative fluidity. However, by the third day I had had it. French? Ha! I could barely speak English anymore. I slept longer and longer and felt more and more exhausted. After that short experience, I am a little worried about how the first 2 weeks in September will go (when I am in class for 2 5-day weeks straight thru), but thankfully, with the company of my friend Jennifer.

Jennifer lives in Paris with her husband and 8-year old daughter. She’s officially become an immigrant mother, as her daughter Nell translates for her (after only one year) like the Chinese mothers and their children in San Francisco. On Tuesday, my first full day back in Paris and class, Jennifer and I met for lunch in front of the Pompidou Centre at 2 PM. There was a restaurant she wanted to show me (that was closed but Eric and I tried it the following week, more on that later). Maybe we would see an exhibition of some kind.

We ended up just having lunch at another, unremarkable restaurant. She has a really interesting theory about accents. Have you noticed that French people and English people say the word “France” in roughly the same way (considering the vowel sound at least)? Have you noticed that when you heard German’s speaking from far away, it sounds a whole lot like English? And of course everyone knows that American was almost German speaking at one point, it just ended up English instead. So, Jennifer’s theory is that the reason the American accent is different than the English is due to the influence of the many many German settlers there.

Another highlight of the week included dinner with Muriel in the Oberkampf neighborhood. We found a “traditional Parisien bistro” and ate on the sidewalk. It turns out she has a twin brother who works for the same company, and we had a very interesting conversation about competitiveness between siblings and how it influences are lives. We also talked out relationship patterns among siblings and their differences or similarities. As an example of how Muriel is different from her brother, she mentioned that he likes to talk about events and she likes to talk about feelings. Aside from the obvious gender stereotype at play there, as our conversation about feelings continued, I couldn’t help but noticed that what she said about herself was true.

I made yet another Mexican dinner for Mido and JP on Friday night, with the compulsory way too much food, but I think it was successful. Then Saturday arrived, and so did Eric, and I moved to stay at Muriel’s bc she had gone to Egypt to scuba dive in the Red Sea.