Even Travelling to the Other Side of the Country Can Make You Doubt Your Intelligence
November 27, 2004
After reading Owen’s blog on the Antibias Curriculum, I was reminded of a similar culture shock experience I had while taking a semester worth of courses at Laval University in Quebec City.
Because I am a French major, part of my degree requirement is going on a French exchange for four months. I chose to do this in my third year after I took most of the intermediate level French classes at the U of L. As a result, I was pretty confident in my language fluency, and was looking forward to being placed in the advanced French classes in Quebec. However, we all had to write a placement test upon arrival. I found the test to be very difficult; mostly because it was in a multiple-choice format and you were always instructed to pick the BEST answer. Whether nerves got the best of me, or I became seriously intimidated, I scored really low on the test. To make matters worse, nobody really understood my disability, and assumed my physical limitations justified my test score. Basically, everybody in Quebec underestimated my ability, and as a result I was stuck in a lower level French class that was not going to allow any progression in my knowledge of the French language.
Perhaps the only bonus to everyone’s ignorance was the fact that I got to spend more time socializing than working on homework. They say this is the best way to learn a language anyways. The fact of the matter was, I needed more practice holding a conversation. My favorite topics to talk about in french revolved around school and the weather. How boring is that?
After reading Owen’s blog on the Antibias Curriculum, I was reminded of a similar culture shock experience I had while taking a semester worth of courses at Laval University in Quebec City.
Because I am a French major, part of my degree requirement is going on a French exchange for four months. I chose to do this in my third year after I took most of the intermediate level French classes at the U of L. As a result, I was pretty confident in my language fluency, and was looking forward to being placed in the advanced French classes in Quebec. However, we all had to write a placement test upon arrival. I found the test to be very difficult; mostly because it was in a multiple-choice format and you were always instructed to pick the BEST answer. Whether nerves got the best of me, or I became seriously intimidated, I scored really low on the test. To make matters worse, nobody really understood my disability, and assumed my physical limitations justified my test score. Basically, everybody in Quebec underestimated my ability, and as a result I was stuck in a lower level French class that was not going to allow any progression in my knowledge of the French language.
Perhaps the only bonus to everyone’s ignorance was the fact that I got to spend more time socializing than working on homework. They say this is the best way to learn a language anyways. The fact of the matter was, I needed more practice holding a conversation. My favorite topics to talk about in french revolved around school and the weather. How boring is that?
posted by Chantelle @ 9:15 PM
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