More on the first week of classes...

Monday when I got home from class I found that my internet had decided not to work well again. Only a sporadic connection. Very frustrating. So Wednesday morning I got up and went to Reid Hall before my 12:30 class to use their wireless. I sure am glad that I have my UF connection in Paris because it’s nice to have a familiar place to go when I need to do stuff like borrow internet! I left really early to find my class because it wasn’t in the main building and I wasn’t sure how long it would take me to find it. Finding classrooms is tricky business at UF too because buildings are listed by abbreviations and then room numbers don’t always make sense, but at least you know that your search is more or less confined to the clearly defined campus. Here Sciences Po holds classes in various buildings around the St. Germain-des-Pres district, and right now it is even more screwed up because one of their main buildings is being renovated so they are borrowing rooms from other institutions, etc. I find the building that my class is supposed to meet in, and it’s the building that is under renovation. So I walk up to it and there are construction workers everywhere and barricades and dust and various construction accouterments. And I see no other students going into this building so I figure that they just put the wrong building on the schedule or something. But I see a guy in a suit walk through the construction in the courtyard and into the glass doors at the back where there seem to be lights on, so I followed him. And I walked in and the little man at the desk asked what I was looking for. I told him I was looking for an amphitheater I thought. I wasn’t really sure because my schedule said 13 rue de l’Université, 7eme, JM. Usually it says the address and then the room number but I didn’t know what JM meant. In my head it was on the 7th floor (7eme) and would somehow be labeled JM. I was wrong. I told the guy my schedule says JM and he said “Oh yes, that’s the Jules Montagne amphitheater” and then told me to do down into the basement. Go figure. Evidently the 7eme just meant it was in the 7th district, not the floor, and JM is the abbreviation for the name of the amphitheater. I sure am glad that most of the buildings have the little men at the desks who know what’s going on.

The class is “Introduction au Moyen Orient” (Intro to the Middle East) and it’s a big french lecture class. About 125-150 I’d say. I ran into some other international students on my way in that I’d met during orientation, so I had people to sit with in class which was nice. It’s funny because Sciences Po is more like highschool than college to me because I’m used to the University of Florida. UF is so huge and most of my friends are in such varied disciplines that I vary rarely have classes with any friends. The exception to that is the French classes because those are small and the advanced ones tend to be the same small group of people who are French minors or majors. So anyway, I think it’s cool that I know/am friends with people in every one of my classes at Sciences Po. It’s a nice comfort thing when you’re in such a foreign environment.

The other nice thing about the lecture was that the professor speaks very clear, crisp French which is easy to understand, and he seems really nice. He lectured for almost the full two hours, and it was a little rough trying to stay focused for that long, but I understood pretty much everything he talked about and it seems like an interesting class. The professor also has a nice habit of saying names of international organizations, etc. in both French and English. That was a BIG help. At the end, he said that he knows there are lots of international students in the class and that language is going to be a problem, so we should never hesitate to interrupt him in the middle of a lecture to ask for clarification or ask that he speak more slowly or write a word on the board. He said the French students can just deal with it if he needs to go slower. I thought that was very nice of him trying to make us feel welcome and comfortable. I still imagine that the French students are probably pretty annoyed that there are soo many international kids, since we are 1/3 of the school. But at the same time, they are all required to spend their 3rd year of college abroad so they are going to be in the same situation as us soon and they should probably realize what a cool opportunity they have to be around and learn from people from every corner of the world. They don’t all seem as scary and standoffish as I expected though, so that’s a plus.

I got kind of annoyed with some of the other Americans in the class though because we’re sitting there surrounded by French students and they decide to talk about how annoying the French students are in their other classes and how they’re weird and don’t like us, and I’m sitting there thinking- well of course they don’t like us! You’re badmouthing them right in front of them at THEIR school! Can you blame them? I mean, after all, most of them speak English so it’s not like they don’t know what you are saying. I cringe whenever I see Americans contributing to the “ugly American” stereotype. On the metro, in stores, I see it all the time, and I think I’m probably more offended than the French are because they’re giving ME a bad name. I try not to judge them too harshly and remind myself that it’s just cultural misunderstanding and they don’t realize they are behaving badly but there are honestly times when I’m embarrassed to be an American. Ah well, I do my best to give people a positive impression of America and I wait until out of earshot to complain about the French. ;-)
bis-
Lyndsey