My Exploding Cat

Archive for May 12th, 2012

Blog, 5/11/2012

So! There are nine days of school left. And for some reason, I end up missing a lot.

I don’t mean the sarcastic “soooome reason,” (see: senioritis, junioritis, sophomoritis, and in some bad cases, freshmanitis) but just… stuff. Today I woke up with a nasty stomachache (no, not the female-exclusive-once-a-month kind or anything). What happened? My allergies. Nature is trying to kill me, in the form of torturous stomachaches and post-nasal drip.

Also, my French teacher is not helping very much. I actually missed Tuesday to stay home and get some schoolwork done (ha!). Funny as it sounds, this works. I got everything that I could do at home done. It was pretty awesome. Course, I still have a truckload of quizzes to do, but that should be at least partially fixed on Monday.

The reason I’m having so many issues in French is actually not a singular reason. As usual.

1. It’s the end of the year, and I’m seriously losing track of the class. Every time she writes down our homework on the board or something, I either get the wrong page (at which point I end up doing more work, unnecessarily) or she switches to a different topic and I’m too distracted by her to remember to write down what I’m supposed to do. Awkward.

2. She has dumped her crap on us. I don’t mean in the chamber-pot-out-the-window way where you can be perfectly safe as long as you carry a really big umbrella that’s been coated with Scotch Guard. This lady has assigned us four chapters out of the textbook for us to do–on our own–in two and a half weeks. A normal, somewhat closer-to-reality teacher would reserve four weeks for four chapters, and that’s with her help and WITHOUT making her students do just about every assignment in the book. All those assignments are there so the teacher can pick and choose which ones she wants the kids to do–not so she can hand them a workbook each and say “Do this stuff. Here you go, have fun!”

There’s also a lot of unnecessary drama over the fact that this teacher is leaving after the end of the year. I mean, she’s a good teacher and explains stuff well and isn’t screamy, but there are a whole bunch of kids protesting and demanding that this teacher, Miss… um… “Ms. Robinson” is kept instead of the other French teacher, “Mrs. Jones.” “Mrs. Jones” is senior to “Ms. Robinson,” and that’s why she’s staying, which is a really stupid principle.

I like Ms. Robinson, and I also like Mrs. Jones. Ms. Robinson gives you too much work sometimes; Mrs. Jones gives you hardly any work. Ms. Robinson tends to be more strict; Mrs. Jones is very casual.

Mrs. Jones is really cool, and she speaks both French and German, but she’s also just about as easily distracted as a kitten if someone mentions something that happened in history, or a movie that came out recently, or the color of that one cloud yesterday, or the fact that they will never buy a certain brand of dog food again because they gave it to their dog and now their back yard smells like a sewer and their mom got really angry so they went out and sprayed all the poop with Febreze. (Actually, that last one is more likely to come out of my German class.)

Once, when I took French III with Mrs. Jones, we got onto the subject of animal sounds in different languages, and whether dogs barked differently in France (the answer is no, in case you’re reading this late at night), and then got onto some really weird stuff. (The owls do say “Qui fait la cuisine pour vous?” though.*) In German, there’s an ongoing expressed desire to have a miniature pig as a pet and to walk it down the street. The guys in this class (guy-girl ratio is about 4:1) think that this is a good way to get girls’ attention.

Ms. Robinson has us do some pretty cool stuff, though. Our final is this big French formal dinner thing that we do outside school hours. Then, on finals day, she has to have a paper-test final… but it’s not actually going to be graded. Doctor’s appointments are encouraged on that day.

I wonder how the seating will be arranged for this dinner thing. Traditionally, the language classes work like this.

French: Taken mostly by girls.

German: Taken mostly by guys.

Spanish: Taken mostly by people who don’t care, and just want their language credits so they can get this obligatory class thing over.

So, since there are more girls than guys, how are we going to alternate genders in the seating, as done traditionally (unless I have this wrong)? Oh, well… that’s a problem for later. I know who I’d kinda like to sit by, although this might cause a minor inability to speak English, let alone French, and which might leave me garbling together some German words in an effort to translate what I’m trying to say into a language that isn’t English.

You could say that he is cute. And awesome. And talks to me like a human being, very coherently, and I can reply very coherently too… in English. It’s a little-known fact that if you treat girls like they’re, you know, people… rather than like members of the species OHMYGOSHAGIRL, or the slightly more low-cut species OHMYGOSHAGIRLWITHBOOBS… the aforementioned girl-people will like you better. And this guy is nice to people, not arrogant, kind of casual and friendly, and is also really, really smart.

I suspect he is an ENTP. And, as an INTP, ENTPs are probably my favorite type to hang around. They’re just… really cool people. There was one famous ENTP scientist who struck up a conversation with a janitor at a place where he’d delivered a speech earlier, and the janitor didn’t realize until somewhat later in the conversation who this guy was. The janitor said, “He seemed like the kind of guy you’d go bowling with.” They have all these cool ideas that could go anywhere; it’s a shame that these ideas often seem so far-fetched that people don’t take them seriously enough. They’re not quite as selective as INTPs about which ideas they voice, but they tend to say their ideas and then run a quick analysis of why or why not the idea wouldn’t work–although if you get an INTP who likes to mutter to him/herself (like me), then you’ll get voiced opinions and then a running debate with the same person playing both sides. This is a really fun thing to watch. Don’t miss it if you have the chance to observe.

For those of you who are new, I’m taking French and German at the same time. I think that this is one of the coolest things you can do with your high school schedule, if a little confusing at times. Tip: when you’re picking your “French name” and “German name,” try and see if you can find names that are really similar in spelling. That way, if you switch them up by accident–for instance, “Jacqueline” or “Raoulf” on a German paper–then the teacher might be able to figure it out, given the similarity and your handwriting.

Also, something I learned in French I: don’t use any name that sounds like a commonly-used word. My middle name is Aimee, and it is French, so I decided to use that for my French name at first. But every time the teacher said the word “love” (aime, aimes, aiment, etc.) or “friend” (ami[e]), I was jerking my head up from my paper, thinking I was being called on for something. I have a way of zoning out from everything else when I concentrate, and while it does have a habit of delivering “A” papers, it can be a little weird realizing that the past fifteen minutes was spent joking about how you aren’t paying attention to their French animal noises conversation or whatever, and you haven’t noticed.

Anyway! Now I’m the one who’s being kitten-distracted. It’s fifteen minutes past midnight and I can’t think of anything else to write about, so this is the end of my post. Woooooooo

*”Who cooks for you?” is traditionally the owl sound. Except it sounds nothing like an owl.