That Time I Traded Summer Camp For Etymology Lessons + How I Speak French
I always wanted to be a writer in some capacity. For a while, I thought I would study journalism at NYU, but somewhere along the line, my career aspirations shifted and I set my sights on FIT for fashion merchandising instead, with an end goal of becoming a fashion magazine editor. Then I moved to Paris while there for vacation and well.. all my plans went out the window. I enrolled in a school where I was accepted overnight because they were thrilled to have their first foreigner and I immediately went from being a top student to almost failing out of le cours de microéconomie (microeconomics) and don’t even get me started on le cours de comptable (accounting). I just couldn’t keep up because numbers in French are their own math problems (i.e. to say ninety, you actually have to say four-twenty-ten) and when it comes to math.. let’s just say, you would never want me to handle splitting a group bill unless you’re feeling extra generous that night.
Anyway, I managed to scrape by with decent enough marks all things considered, but when I saw le cours de philosophie (philosophy) on my schedule (you don’t get to choose your own classes in France), I knew my high school French was never going to cut it. My professor did not speak one word of English and she was not interested in making any accommodations for me to the point that one day, she strode into class with a handful of photocopies and personally handed a stack of pages to every student in the room… except me. Assuming it was an oversight, I asked, “Where’s mine?” to which she smugly responded in her perfect French, “I didn’t want to waste paper.” Call me dramatic, but I stood up, made some angry remark that most likely came out gibberish, and went home.
I will still argue with anyone who tells me French people are rude. I happen to admire their forthright nature, especially because you know in the movies when a bully knocks down a kid enough times, eventually the kid goes home, ditches his glasses, learns some karate, and comes back ready to fight? That was me. I got myself a tutor, begged my friends to stop practicing their English on me, and studied the French language like it was my job. It was like that time I traded summer camp for etymology lessons. I quite literally enrolled myself in vocabulary boot camp rather than spend another summer vacationing in Israel, but I didn’t care what anyone else thought because I was on a mission to absolutely crush the SATS (scored in the 98th percentile for English btw, but don’t ask me how I did in math. lol). I learned how to write a killer essay that summer in high school and I learned how to speak a completely foreign language that year in college. And guess what? Not only was I able to turn my writing skills into a career, but I now get to give my son the gift of a second language.
x Esther
