L’Ecole des Trois Ponts, Roanne, France (http://www.3ponts.edu)
We arrived here at Chateau de Matel (built in 1536) for a week of language
courses. Roanne is in a region of France called « Le Masif Central » south
of the wine-growing region of Burgundy.
Lisa and I are taking 19 hours over five days, Kyle and Evan about 6-10
hours. There are about fifteen others here, including a family from Bermuda
(Jeff and Fiona) with two boys, Damien and Killian, ages 11 and 12 (yea!) as
well as a mixture of others. There is a couple from LA (Mary Jane and
Mark), a woman from New York (Laurie), an Israeli couple from Lausanne,
Switzerland with a friend from Tel Aviv, a couple from Preston, in the north
of England (Louis and Joan), a man from outside Stockholm (Heinrich), a
woman from Luxembourg (Sigrid), and another two people from Germany.
Lisa and I are in different classes. Kyle and Evan have had some private
lessons (with Emily and Valerie) and some together. Rene, who is one of the
managers here, keeps telling us that it is very difficult to teach them
because they are so young, but Valerie seems to do a good job.
August 1, 2002
L’Ecole des Trois Ponts, Roanne
We are learning a lot – I think we are doing so much better today than we
were doing on Monday. For example, we had a game today with vocabulary
words like “le torchon” and “la gomme” which we had to describe – en
francais, bien sur – for the other students to guess. A common exercise
which Mike’s teacher, Françoise, is doing is to have us describe an
experience we’ve had (our town, a favorite vacation) which forces us to use
vocabulary words and different verb tenses (imperfect and the past, called
in French « passé compose »). At meals, there are two tables, an
English-language table (which has effectively become the children’s table)
and a French-language table where one is supposed to speak only French (and
the rule is enforced in a friendly way by the other diners). The first
night we were here, I was incredibly intimidated by the thought of spending
an entire dinner speaking only French, but now I don’t even think of it and
we do OK – the wine really helps!
August 2, 2002
L’Ecole des Trois Ponts, Roanne
Today, I heard Evan singing to himself in French, a song he learned in
class, which I take as a good sign. And yesterday, Lisa went by their class
and they were both laughing with the teacher. So they are doing better than
we expected, although there still is some resistance to the idea of being
here.
We’ve got a bit of travelling planned for August, the traditional vacation
month in France, but to our collective relief, I think, we’ve decided NOT to
go to Normandy later this month to see the WW II beaches as we’d planned.
So we’ll go from here to Grenoble, tomorrow (Saturday) and stay there for
four days, getting some stuff out of our car and into storage, and let the
kids see the apartment (hopefully). Then on Tuesday, the 6th, we’ll take
the train back to Paris (3 hours on the TGV) and fly out that night to
Iceland. We’ll be visiting friends in Iceland until the 13th, when we
return to Paris. Then we would have been going to Normandy (which would
have involved ANOTHER train trip back through Paris) and we’ll instead now
return to Grenoble on the 14th or 15th and stay there until school starts on
the 5th of September, probably with a day trip here and there. I think it
will be much better, provided it isn’t too hot in Grenoble.
The weather has been beautiful here the last couple of days, after a very,
very hot start on Monday and Tuesday when we had trouble sleeping. Much of
France is “sans climatisation” as they say (no air conditioning) so you
really feel the heat. But the kids are loving the heat. I’ll have to send
you some of the photos in a separate mail…
We got our French report cards today and both Lisa and I were pleased
(wisely, I think, the kids didn’t get one). Lisa is rated as
“Professional+” (which is third on a level between “Beginning” and
“Bilingual”). So that’s quite good, I think. I was rated “Social+” which
is the second level, so just above beginning, which I think is probably
right. Lisa’s more adept at tenses than I am — for me, everything is
happening now, in the present, not in the past or the future — and she has
a broader vocabulary. But I think we’re all surprised and pleased at the
progress we’ve made, although we can also now see more clearly the long road
ahead of us.