One of the side benefits of being funemployed is that I have more time for volunteering. Lilian attends a French public school, but her language section (anglophone) is a non-profit organization supported by its parents. With the exception of Japanese, the other language sections are all subsidized by their associated governments. Ours very much is … not.
(Who would even pay for it? The anglophone section includes students from 50+ different countries).
All of this is to say, parent volunteers do a lot of the grunt work and quite a bit of fundraising. Today, I did my part by helping out with a money-making opportunity. Our association is getting paid this year to help students at all of the local high schools return their school books. High schoolers are scary enough on their own, but then you add in a foreign language? I specifically buddied up with a French friend so I’d have backup.
It ended up being pretty fun!
My friend took care of the logistics of the students checking off their names and scanning the barcodes on their books. My job was to help them stack everything in orderly piles. It was oddly soothing to square the books up and put them into bundles of five books each. I joked with the students that we were playing “cache-cache” (hide and seek) with the book locations, but I got pretty good at remembering where each book went.
Our students today were all in “terminale,” which is their final year of “lycée” (high school). In other words, they were all seniors. I find the French way of naming grade levels super confusing. You have terminale, and then it goes backwards. Who knew that learning French would involve so much math? All of the numbers from 80 (“quatre-vingt” or four twenties) to 99 (“quatre-vingt-dix-neuf” or four twenties plus ten plus nine) involve arithmetic.
French kids also start school a lot earlier than we do in the States. Lilian will be in middle school for an extra year, because high school doesn’t start until “seconde” (10th grade).
For our students today, returning their books was one of the last steps on the way to being done with school. Quite a few of them got a little wistful about it! Of course, there were also several students that bid a cheery farewell to their math books.
(If only they knew just how much math they’ll have to remember just to sing about 99 red balloons).
I loved watching them help each other find their piles (it was most definitely organized chaos) and they were all so cheerful and polite! Just about all of them thanked me for helping them. And most of them wished me a good day. I mostly said the same things over and over again, but it was still good French practice. I don’t think I’ll ever forget how to say “the Spanish books are under that table.”
(I’m told that the juniors yesterday were a lot wilder.)
It was fun to see what sorts of textbooks they use. There were the standard ones like math, history, etc but everyone also takes geography (imagine knowing where other countries are!). They also take philosophy, which is pretty darn cool. And there were quite a few people who had “Droit” (law). Students specialize at a much earlier age here. One of the focuses that you can do in high school is law. My past self is overwhelmed at the idea of choosing a career at such an early age, but there are still plenty of more generalized options.
Speaking of my past self, it’s wild to see high schoolers wearing outfits that I would have rocked when I was their age. Fashion truly is cyclical. The shoes are a lot chunkier than ours were, but they’re all wearing giant jeans these days. I can only imagine how much water they wicked up when it poured cats and dogs earlier this week. No chain wallets, though.
I have another volunteer opportunity, but I don’t want to jinx it by talking about it before the information session. Please cross your fingers for me on that one!
