October 3rd, 2006

Dear Diary,

Today I learned the definition of the derogatory term, "numpty":

A player who couldn't hit a cow's arse with a shovel would be a f***ing numpty. - The Urban Dictionary

* * *

It's not something I like to advertise, for many reasons, but I work for a decidedly French (France-French, not Quebecois-French) company. One of the bits of training I am currently undergoing is French language lessons.

Now, when I started this class, I was the least-knowledgeable about French of all the students. In fact, I took German in high school just to get away from French. At the time I thought it was wonderful; I rather unreasonably hated French class when I was a child and pre-teen, and the thought of actually being able to direct myself away from it into a course of my own choice enthralled me. German was the course of choice, and I was a competent German student, probably buoyed—especially at the start—by being able to choose it, more than by having any superior abilities in that language.

But, as good and useful as German is, my near-complete lack of French has been an occasional handicap and a more-frequent embarrassment living in Canada—even if just Western Canada. So when the opportunity to take French came up, I jumped at it eagerly.

But it was an eagerness that lasted only until about 5 minutes into my first class when I suddenly found myself the class dummy. If they still did that sort of thing, I'd be the guy standing in the corner with the dunce cap. Everybody had more knowledge of the vocabulary and grammar than I did, the teacher was using Cumulative Mastery methods—an approach I never thought much of myself (or used when I taught English) and everything was progressing about 5 centimetres beyond my grasp.

I don't like being the weakest link in any setting, but there wasn't much I could do about it in that first class. I just smiled, got it wrong every time the focus came around to me, endured the slightly pissy patience from my teacher that most teachers display with class dummies, and ignored the confusing and cross-purposed (but well-meaning) attempts at help from my fellow students.

But by bloody hell-fire and brimstone I was going to make every effort to avoid that situation a second time! So I studied last weekend and again at lunch times. I read the previous lessons repeatedly out loud to my wife and cat (and sometimes just to the plants) and I wrote and memorized my verbs and vocabulary. Jesus, I even read ahead to today's lesson repeatedly until I knew at least what it was about. I had AltaVista's Babel Fish working overtime to figure out nouns and verbs in their infinitive forms, and (as it turns out) was the only student who could get his CD to work, after scrubbing it clean with alcohol.

Fear and humiliation are effective short-term motivations, so I was happy to prod myself along those lines to be a better French student for today's class. And, for this week anyhow, they worked. I was prepared; I knew my last week's lesson better than the other students had remembered it. I had done all my homework—other students just gave up when their CDs wouldn't work (all the CDs had some sort of sticky scudge on them) and by reading ahead and re-reading and translating and re-re-reading today's lesson, I actually knew what was going on in class so much so that I was a great French student today.

Right at the end of class some words and structures came up that left me curious, so now I have a mandate to further study during this upcoming weekend, but I got the gist of all of it, and I showed the teacher and—more importantly—myself that I don't have to be the dunce in my French class. The motivation for next week's class is no longer fear and humiliation. I can now feel good about this class, because I have proved I can do it, and I can even have fun doing it ... provided I am prepared. So concern for the subject and an anticipation of being good at it can replace my former fears.

I like that.

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