Higher Education

All right, all right, people. Here's the post you've been begging for. I haven't been writing because I haven't been doing much of anything that has not involved one or all of the following:

1. Going to school all day everyday
2. Also going to school at night
3. Wishing I was not at school
4. Doing schoolwork
5. Reflecting about how I feel about what we learned at school
6. Panicking about school
7. Talking to people from school about school
8. Trying to avoid talking to people from school about anything, really.

So, yes, I'm back at school. Vancouver only has one university way over on the other side of town, right before you fall into the ocean. I'm not going to that school, I am going to the school in the next town over from us, way atop Burnaby Mountain. And let me tell you, this is higher education (but only in terms of altitude). Ostensibly I'm there to learn how to teach teenagers how to be better people through the correct conjugation of French verbs. But at this point I am not convinced that the ends justifies the means.

This experience is unlike any other learning I've ever encountered. First, we don't get marks. At all. Ever. Second, we talk about our feelings. A lot. And then we go home and write about our feelings. And then we come back to school and share what we've written about the feelings that we talked about yesterday. Then we make a poster about our feelings with hidden flaps, and fun pictures. Then we share our posters and talk about how we feel about how creative we are for expressing our feelings in poster form.

I, for one, am running out of feelings. And patience.

I really want to learn to do something. For example, how does one go about planning a lesson? How does one choose activities that are engaging and awesome? What does one do if the students stage some sort of mutiny in the classroom? How does one keep from falling asleep after lunch when all one wants to do is curl up under one's desk? How does one find French videos that do not include full frontal nudity or old men in speedos?

I will let you know if we stop feeling and start doing. In the meantime, maybe you can answer some of my burning questions. Oh, and if you could answer them in French it would be even better, because (did I mention?) all of my schooling is in French!


~g. mango souhaite que le subjonctif ait une morte atroce

--
*And, on account of it being my second language, I have even fewer feelings in French than I do in English.