When I am King...I have a dream. About French class. It's a nightmare.
Let me see a show of mouse-clicks: who has recurring dreams about school that involve total, abject failure? For me, the scenario is this: I realize in my dream that the French final is tomorrow, but somehow I've forgotten to go to class for the entire term. Now I have to learn the entire language and textbook by the following morning. Je dois etudier beaucoup.
What's particularly disturbing about this dream is not related to French, or failing a class, or the manic way in which I'm running around in my dream looking for the classroom like a character in Run, Lola, Run. No, the disturbing part is that I haven't been in any kind of classroom situation for over 15 years, had not taken a single French class for years at that time, and French was never any kind of huge priority for me in the first place. And yet I apparently still worry about missing French class.
Many huge things happen in life that we should worry about: marriage, work, kids, war, gnomes hiding under the bed, financial ruin, and hair growth in undesirable places. But missing French class seems to be the only way my brain can express its uptightness.
The fix here is, of course, obvious. My government will require that everyone attend regular French classes. These classes will be structured in such a flexible way that it will be impossible for anyone to ever miss a class, or to suffer on the Final Exam for having done so. In this way, our society will get rid of the emotional baggage that we have endured for so long.
Of course, this plan may cause the possible burden of speaking another language, a result which defeats one of the great American skills of speaking only English. But there will be no requirement of actually learning French, or of using it outside of the classroom. The intent is to simply be able to make it to French class successfully, not to get anything useful out of the experience. Remember, this plan not about French. It's about class.
2 comments:
I have that nightmare about chemistry class . . . and I never took chemistry.
Oh man. I get very similar nightmares about language exams - that I haven't read a single line from the book all term and one fine day the exam is just round the corner, a few hours away. Glad to know I'm not the only one getting such nightmares.
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