Les classes commencent!

The next morning, I started class at 10:30. I walked to school alone, since Pearl started class two hours before me. And I got lost. I don't know how I got so lost, but it's a good thing I left the house over an hour before class started, because it took me that long to get to the school. Luckily, after about forty minutes of walking, I came out onto a street that ran along the river. My school's on the river as well, so I just had to walk alongside the river and I knew I'd get to the school. Finally, after an hour-long walk, I made it to school.

I was in the same class as Katie and Brittany, and when we got to class that morning, we met another American, Aidan, and a German guy named Leni. There were also a lot of students from Libya. In total, there were about fifteen of us in this class. It was a different style of class than I'm used to in the US. We had no textbooks, so we just had to take notes as the teacher lectured through myriad topics of French grammar and vocabulary. I was lucky—I felt like I was in a good level for my skills, and I shared class with friends, so I was happy. Other people didn't get quite so lucky right away, but a lot of us did some shifting of class levels until we were comfortable.

I personally lasted just three days in A2.1 before my teacher decided to move me and one other person. She wanted to move all the American students, and Leni, because it was clear that we just weren't on the same level as the Libyan students. But there was only room to move two of us, so we all took a series of small tests (again!), and my teacher graded them and decided to move Brittany and I to A2.2. The day that I changed class levels, Miranda was moved up into my class. So for about fifteen minutes, we were all in the same class. And then, since Brittany was on vacation with her host family, I headed to A2.2 by myself—more than a little nervous about how difficult this new class would be.

Fortunately, A2.2 turned out to be exactly what I needed. I had two teachers—Agathe taught class on Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday morning; Olivier taught class on Wednesday afternoon, Thursday, and Friday. They had different teaching styles, but I felt like I was really able to start learning and expanding on my French. The classes were broken up into three sessions. In the morning, I started with two hours of lecture/speaking. Those two hours generally alternate between explanations by the teacher and different exercises to practice speaking French. After lunch, there's a one hour session where we watch videos, listen to audio clips, or do other exercises to improve grammar or listening comprehension—it depends on what the teacher chooses for that particular day.

Once I was settled into A2.2, I started to feel like my French was improving much more rapidly. I was getting a better understanding for grammar, I was learning more vocab, and I was getting more comfortable speaking the language. I'm still very, very far from anything resembling fluency, but I feel much more confident with French now than I did when I first arrived in France and could barely order dinner.

I also met a group of students from Arkansas in A2.2. I knew that there were two main groups of American students at the CLA: Penn State students and Arkansas students. There were a few other people from other schools around the United States, but most of us were concentrating in those two groups. By the end of the month, most of us had made friends with many of the Arkansas students, and when we had to say good-bye to them at the end of June, it was with promises of visiting each other soon. In my class, there were four Arkansas students: Kim, Adriana, Daniel, and Joel. There were also two other Penn State students in our class: Mars and Sabrina. We took over an entire corner of the class—our own little section of America.

I no longer had class with Katie, Aidan, Leni, or Miranda but we still had lunch at the same time. So for the entire month of June, we would meet every morning in the hallway outside our classrooms, trading stories of the night before. And then we'd go our separate ways and meet up again two hours later, this time talking about what topics we'd learned in class that morning. It was an easy routine to settle into, and it was nice to have that break from French every day. Five hours of classes is a lot, and it's easy to feel overwhelmed by French when you start the day by eating breakfast with a French-speaking host mother, then go to French class for five hours, and then go back to your host house for more French.

I won't share stories from classes—with so much class time, I'd be telling stories for months, and still have some left to tell. And there's so much more to talk about—after all, I had two months to spend in France, and with so many sites to see, there was no way I was going to stay in Besancon for all of it!