People! You heard it here first: 2nd semester French is HARD! Especially for you lamos who don't give a shit and never really studied during 1st semester and somehow skated thru with a passing grade. Now you're in 2nd semester and all of a sudden it's my fault that your grades are going down exponentially! Heaven forbid it be a case of too little too late on your part! It must be the instructor.
Grrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
I have the biggest batch of whiny pitifuls in that class. First since it's Monday and we had a test Friday, they seemed to have wiped their hard drives where any oral French comprehension was concerned at all. We started with this question activity, very like what we almost always do at the beginning of each class, altho it gets a slight adjustment each day to reflect what we just saw in the book, and it was absolutely out of the question that they get it thru their obtuse heads today. I kept re-modeling and re-explaining and still was met with dead stares. Or not really dead, more like the offensed, trodden-upon ones, that would only be justified if I had walked in speaking Chinese instead of French or explaining in French some of the finer points of postmodernist literary theory and asking them to run with it.
It pretty much went downhill (not in a good way) from there. After that we were doing this (I thought) fun passé composé/imparfait thing where they were to get with a partner and pick a candidate to talk about (Barack, Hillary or John Mc.) They were to give a list of 3 or 4 things that this person did this weekend or last week or some other day of their choosing. Then they were to give a list of 3 or 4 things that this person used to do when they were little. Fucking hell. Moan moan moan. I couldn't figure out what the problem was when finally 2 or 3 people started saying they didn't pay attention to the news this weekend and how were they supposed to know what was going on in politics. (OK let's not even touch that part -partly because I'm not as informed as I could be myself- but whatever.) I smiled gently and laughingly answered, (altho I couldn't help rolling my eyes), "One more time, you are imagining this person's activities. This is not real. Assuming you didn't live with this person when they were little you're not going to be able to give facts about that part either, are you?!"Geemony christmas. (And I'll spare you the details about how none of them (save 2 or 3) can form passé composé or imparfait to save their lives.) Used to be I had fun classes where you'd give them something like that and 5 minutes later we're all splitting a gut because someone says this weekend Hillary and Barack played ping-pong with clown suits on and shit.
After that I set aside time today to work on pronouns some more together on a worksheet since they've been freaked about them and we have still more to do this chapter and virtually no one used them properly on our test Friday. You'd think I'd asked them to break rocks in the quarry or something. (Wait, you want effort from us?! Here in class?) Then I gave them 20 minutes to work on compos together and I can't imagine why I thought that was a good idea. More of the same... Two or three used it constructively, most of the others were basically just throwing up their hands about the whole thing, even after I'd show them some mistake that concerns a Ch. 1 or so grammar point.
Gah! I know how it is to struggle in a class, believe me. Dr. Pace's logic class my Freshman year almost killed me, and I am sure I wanted to throw my hands up and just go have a pity party, but I went to office hours and started (crazy concept!) STUDYING and I improved hugely. Sure it's different for everyone but time was when the majority of my students here or out west were proactive and came to office hours and GAVE A SHIT rather than blaming us or the course and just giving up.
That's it. From now on we'll just barrel ahead and fuck the ones who fall thru the cracks. If they can't be troubled to take charge and come see me for help in office hours they can bite the big one. And while we're at it, fuck fun, too. You wanna have fun? It's not gonna happen with this crew.
At least I didn't talk myself into letting them correct the compos for extra credit. Ha!
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