Learning is a process… sometimes I forget that.
OK… I often forget that. Like when I tried to learn physics in an evening and left rage-induced crumpled notebook pages all over the dorm room floor of my friend, the Fiddler, or when I tried to learn math from my father and fled to my room in tears after being incapable of understanding how 13 divided by 50 was the same thing as 1.3 divided by 5. Looking back, I don’t see how that ever could have not made sense… but that’s all part of the process.
When I first arrived in France, I learned new words every day. Language acquisition–that period in a toddler’s life where he’s learning dozens of words at a time–isn’t learning; it’s impossible to “learn” quite so quickly, and a child’s capacity for acquisition of this kind is outgrown at a fairly young age. Learning French in a fully immersed environment, though, was as close as I was going to get to what English acquisition was like in a learning context, memorizing and immediately using new terms every day. I woke up every morning speaking French better than I spoke it when I went to bed the night before, and what’s more, even I noticed it, something that’s usually difficult to detect. I could feel my tongue getting used to the sounds, my brain clicking into French mode and staying there. It was a fascinating experience and a defining one for me.
I have long since resigned myself to the fact that I won’t learn like this again. For that matter, I have pretty much resigned myself that improving in French in general, at least for me, is something that’s pretty much over.
I love when I’m wrong.
I first joined my class at the Sorbonne to improve my writing, something that I soon realized, after sitting through a handful of painstaking classes on verb tenses I’d already learned, wasn’t going to happen. I concentrated on the things that I enjoyed: the French novel, French history, philiosophy, linguistics and, of course my thesis class.
When, on the first day of class, our thesis advisor asked us to pick a topic for our thesis, I wasn’t prepared; I spat out the first thing that came to mind, a topic that interested me but that wasn’t exactly something I knew a lot about. After she had jotted it down, along with the topics of the half-dozen other people in our class, she let us in on a secret. Apparently, the only person in the whole world who was going to be an expert on the topics we had chosen was us.
How terrifying.
Slowly, I started to research, putting together a corpus of novels I would read, each week coming in feeling as though I hadn’t done nearly enough work and somehow finding a way to make it seem as though I had. I listened as she corrected the other students–the American Proust Fan had an early habit of pronouncing genre (gender) gendre, which I learned meant son-in-law. Interesting, if not particularly useful, seeing as in over three years of living in France, I had never encountered this word before.
Except that a week later, as I watched one of my favorite French comedy shows, Un Gars, Une Fille, I heard it pronounced. Cool, I thought. I guess it is kinda useful. Then, reading Le Père Goriot for my thesis, I noticed it again. Gendre. A word that had never crossed my radar until a few weeks ago, and now it’s just as familiar as the plethora of other words I’ve tucked away into my brain, not used on a daily basis but–like linen and telescope and prosthetic in English–familiar when I need them to be.
I reread the compte rendus I hand in to my thesis advisor every week today. Six weeks of feeling as though I haven’t progressed. Six weeks of pouring everything I know about my topic onto paper and staring at it, feeling as though it’s nothing at all. Six weeks of feeling as though this class, like writing composition and oral expression, is one more class that, until now, has taught me very little.
Like I said… I love when I’m wrong.
Every time I’ve made lasagna, I’ve felt that I’m at the pinacle of my lasagna-making abilities, and each time, I’ve come a bit further and been proven wrong. I made the Daring Baker’s lasagna more than a year ago for the first time, and while it was praised, I was fairly sure I wouldn’t make it again because of how time consuming again.
Foiled once again.
Recipe:
Lasagne Verdi al Forno
The Country Boy says it’s better than his aunt’s. Which previously conquered his mom’s. Seeing as he’s a lasagna lover, that’s high praise.
You know, considering neither Woolf nor Proust had any children, I’m finding it pretty incredible how much they wrote about their sons in law. 😛 Frenchfail City–Population: Me.
This lasagna is quite good: there’s less cheese than in traditional recipes, but the béchamel more than makes up for it.