School

This is my first week of school. I have really only had three full days of school because on Monday we only had to go for an hour to meet the class and get basic information. The way schedules work is that everyone is divided into classes of about 20, according to language. There are seven francophone classes in the third year, and I am in one of them. It's a nice system for me as an exchange student because I am with the same people in most of my classes, so it gives me a chance to learn everyone's name and get to know them better.

My schedule is different every day. These are the classes and hours per week of each class: philosophy (3), English (3), physics (2), homeroom (1, and this is "maître de classe," roughly translated), music (5), math (4), gym (3), German (3), French (4), art (2), history (2), geography (2), religion (1). School starts for me at 8:05 or 8:50, depending on the day. There is a project called le travail de maturité or Maturarbeit which everyone starts in the third year, but I don't have to do it, so that gives me Monday afternoons off. On the rest of the days, school ends at 3:30 pm or 4:20 pm.

Getting to school is quite different from what I did last year, which involved something like jumping out of bed, pulling on some clothes, shoving down some breakfast, throwing together a lunch, brushing my teeth, and driving ten minutes to school. Here I get up at 6:30 or so, and we leave the house at 6:45. (I shower at night to give myself more sleep time in the morning.) It's a five minute walk to the bus stop, which involves climbing a steep gravel path. There are two buses that come one after the other, and we always get on the second. I suppose it is less crowded. Thirty minutes later, I am at the train station, and from there I can take another bus or walk ten or fifteen minutes to school. So far I have been walking because the weather has been nice, but once it gets cold I will probably take the bus.

My easiest class by far is English; I talked to the proviseur and was told I am not obliged to attend my English classes, though I might still show up for the discussion hour anyway. We are supposed to keep the same schedule as our classes for a month before we can switch. After a month, I want to try to take something else in the place of English, perhaps Italian. My math class is also really easy. I am not sure whether the teacher knows I am an exchange student yet because I have managed to answer his questions in French so far. But the material being covered is really what I learned in the first couple of years of high school. I don't know what all is to be covered in that class, but so far we have been "learning" about inverse functions. I miss calculus! But on the other hand, it is nice to know everything that is going on and have no trouble with the material.

So far I have found the music class promising. The school has no official orchestra, but I understand that there is some kind of collaboration at some point with other collèges in the city. Choosing music as my specific option may open the door to music lessons with professors from the conservatory of Fribourg or being able to play in an orchestra, which the school supposedly pays for. What we have done up to this point in the class, though, has been theory- and singing-related. They use the solfège system, which I have not learned before, so that will be fun.

It was only a year ago (plus a couple of months) that I started to learn German on my own. I took it last year as a class at my high school, and for the past three weeks I have been hearing it and speaking it a lot, since that is what my host family speaks. This combination of factors must have worked, because I appear to be at the same level of German as my francophone classmates who have been studying it for eight years. The teacher told me that among the francophone students, it is not generally considered cool to speak German or to learn to speak it well, so my attitude must have made the difference.

Gym is different from what I am used to. I satisfied my physical education requirements in high school by spending a total of six weeks during the summers taking gym classes for five hours a day during summer school. Here, everyone does gym every year in school. My first gym class consisted of a lot of students sitting on the floor while the teachers gave a computer presentation about the winter sport days and the available sports to choose from. Yes, that's right, my school has a week during the year where everyone spends Wednesday through Friday at sort of a sports camp. There are many different activities to choose from: ski, snowboard, dance, hiking, rock climbing, martial arts, scuba diving, and several more. Also, there are choices as to what you do during your gym class at school. Among my favorite choices: trampoline, juggling, new sports (including ultimate frisbee!), and yoga. I have not actually done anything in gym yet, but I'll keep you posted.

Another difference: when a teacher is sick and cannot come to school, the class is cancelled. Unless the school knows that the teacher is going to be gone for a long time, there is not a substitute. For this reason, I have not yet been to my art class, and I just got to go home early that day. Early meaning 2:45 pm, which is when I got out of school every day last year!