French School

So after a couple days of moving around between classes (in France you have all your classes with the same group of people unless you're taking a different language), I am finally in the correct class with my host sister Marine. French school is very different from American school. They count down instead of up, like we do in the U.S. So your juior year, which is the grade I am in, is called Première (1st), while your senior year is called Terminale and your sophomore year is Seconde. And French lycée, which is high school, starts with Seconde, so I guess there really is no official Freshman year.

So anyways, a French school day is completely different from an American one. This morning I woke up at 6 and left the house at 6:40 to get on the bus. Chemistry class started at 8, then math at 9. We got books for all or classes from about 9:30-9:45 and then had a break while some people changed classes before our second half of math. We had math until 11, lunch from 11-12, history from 12-1. Then from 1-3 we sat around and talked (I attempted to at least), and another hour of history until classes were over for the day at 4. Yeah, I know, it's weird! And actually, I have a few classs that double as two subjects. For example, physics and chemistry are the same class, history and geograpy are the same class. French lycée has a week A and a week B, so chemistry is taught during week A, and physics is taught during week B, for example. Not all the students are finished classes at the same time, either. Some days I finish at 4 while others I finish at 5 and wednesdays I finish at noon.

Last year students were allowed to smoke on school grounds but this year they have to go right outside. Oh, and students can leave campus whenever they want if they don't have class, with no pestering about having a pass. So sometime during one of my two hour breaks, maybe I'll go grab something to eat at one of the magnificent local bakeries. We have cards that, when scanned, allow us to open the gate to the school after it opens, and keeps track of meals.

School is of course very hard for me right now because I don't speak French that well. But I'm getting better quickly! The lesson on the industrial revolution in history wasn't hard to follow today, and I even managed to catch on to a joke about soccer when the teacher told us about the Manchester-Liverpool railroad line. But this morning I was really confused as to why the math teacher was talking about croissants when she was talking about croissance (a graph increasing)!

That's it for now. Make sure to check out the pictures I'll put up later tonight. They're only of my town, another small town, and the bike path, but I'l take more as soon as I can.