Ma première classe d’immersion

Ma première classe d’immersion

 

When I first made course selections in the spring of 2012 for my first semester in university, I chose to take the requisite French courses for the immersion program as subject courses taught in French along with the accompanying FLS course. And since I knew that first year psychology courses are the most standardized due to the large number of students who enroll in them I figured that the best French course to start with would be psychology. Big mistake.

 

Quand je suis arrivé à la classe pour la première fois au septembre, j'ai vu une classe de ce qui avait l'air de 500 étudiants et étudiantes (mais qui était probablement plus près au 250) tout en train de parler rapidement en français et aucun d'autres étudient (e)s d'immersion. Le professeur est arrivé en retard et avait initialisé sa présentation de PowerPoint et passé les syllabus. Puis il a commencé d'adresser la classe. Je n'ai compris presque rien. Son français ne me sembler même pas comme le français. Ce que j'ai compris était qu'il est un Bolivien qui a fait ses études universitaires en Suède et était maintenant en train d'enseigner en français a une classe qui était désignée comme la section immersion pour des anglophones.

 

And before you start criticizing my limited French abilities let me just say that the Francophone students were almost as lost as I was. The Profs deep unfamiliar accent, coupled with a giant lecture hall with hundreds of students tapping away on laptops and whispering their confusion, no mike and pour acoustics made understanding the professor virtually impossible. So I sat their tried to decipher what I could and hoped that I would get used to it and things would get easier to understand. They did not.

La prochaine classe je suis arrivé plus tôt afin que je puisse obtenir une place à l'avant la classe. J'ai espéré que cela rend plus facile pour moi d'entendre et comprendre le professeur. En réalité, ça ne change rien. Puis, je suis allé à ma première classe de FFS. Là j'ai appris qu'aucun des étudiantes en immersion peuvent comprendre le professeur et que même le professeur de FFS avait de la difficulté à comprendre. J'ai même visité un des autres sections du cours de psychologie en français avec une autre professeur et j'ai compris plus dans une session de ceci que pendant trois sessions avec mon prof.

 

Finally I decided to switch out of the class. At first I tried to switch into the other French section of the same course but unfortunately as that section hadn’t been designated for the immersion students I wasn’t allowed to take the FFS course with it and since I needed to have two courses in French and the FSS course was my sixth course I would have had to drop one of my English courses and take another French course. So instead I switched into a history course in French with the accompanying FSS course but as the history course conflicted with another of my courses but there weren’t any other immersion courses that I was interested in taking with spots available I also ended up having to switch another of my electives to a different course offered at a different time.

 

At this point I had missed to and a half weeks of the courses I was now registered in and had spent just as long trying to work out a way not to stay in a class where I understood only maybe 5% of what the professor said. Ironically I had even looked up the professor on rate my prof before picking the class in the spring and had seen comments regarding his accent and how difficult it was to understand him. If I had heeded the warnings I could have avoided all this but, at the time, I had figured that the comments were exaggerating. Obviously they weren’t. (Although that is not to say that everything on rate my prof is completely accurate, it is better to look at the comments in general not individual remarks).

 

The lesson in all this? Listen to others advice and don’t be afraid to switch out if you don’t understand a course. It might be a hassle initially but it’s possible and a whole lot better than being lost all semester.