I always loved the French language. Its melodic rhythms and complicated verb connotations excited me.
I was distraught when French AP was canceled my senior year of high school due to lack of student interest, but I consoled myself with the thought that college French would be better anyway.
I purposely refused to study for the placement exam, thinking that the early French classes would be enriching refresher courses. I looked forward to study-abroad and a possible French minor.
Penn ruined French for me before class even started.
French 121 met every day, dashing my hopes for a class-free Friday and complicating my already daunting schedule. I suffered through the mind-numbing workbook assignments and ludicrous class activities of the entry-level course.
For my final project, I spent hours upon hours struggling to make a travel slideshow that did little to teach me the language but much to create within me an intense abhorrence of the iMovie program. I eagerly awaited the more advanced French 130. I had high hopes.
These hopes were dashed almost instantaneously when it was announced that throughout the semester we would be acting as characters living in an apartment building.
Each week we were required to write a composition detailing the events of our character’s life, read our classmates’ compositions, and then discuss the “drama” during class. High marks rewarded papers devoted to illicit affairs between residents and illegal drug trafficking. For my final presentation, my group acted in a skit centered on a coke dealer alias “Snow Leopard.” We got an A.
Entering French 140, I no longer harbored naive expectations. I readied myself to endure the following months, and looked eagerly towards the end of the semester. I was not prepared for the new horror that I faced: freshmen.
These were not ordinary freshmen; they were freshmen blessed with extraordinarily vast knowledge of the French language and accents like angel dust dipped in whipped cream. I was doomed.
Now, on November 20th, 2008 I have only eight class periods remaining before I am done with the French language forever. I am no longer considering a minor (that requires SIX more courses after this one!), and the idea of studying abroad has glimmered away like the vague memory of a pleasant dream.
I’d like to thank you, Penn, for making French a dead language in my eyes. Thank you for taking my favorite subject and stabbing it relentlessly in the heart over and over and over while I stood by watching helplessly. Thank you for cutting it until the blood seeped everywhere and I sobbingly begged you to stop, please, just kill it and put it out of its misery.
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November 20th, 2008 at 2:29 pm
I really hate to sound pretentious, but that really sucks. Coming in with some AP French, I never had to take one of the highschool-esque under 200 level classes. What else do you recommend that the department do?
November 20th, 2008 at 2:46 pm
I’m not really sure what you mean… what sucks?
November 20th, 2008 at 5:27 pm
I’m right with you Chaia!
I took the same 121/130/140 sequence with the same travel project and l’immeuble compositions plus all the lovely films and themed-weeks along the way. I felt more stressed out by the relentless busywork and multiple daily assignments for French class than I was in any of my core Wharton classes as a Freshman.
Then, I took 140 in the summer so I didn’t have to deal with it during the beginning of my sophomore year as well. During the summer, things got even more crazy with hours of homework nightly to cram two weeks of French class into one summer week. Maybe that is the same with other summer classes, but we still met 5 days a week and it was total overload.
I’m glad to see someone else bring up this issue, and I hope that future Penn kids get the experience a different program down the road.
Stick with it and you’ll be done soon!
November 20th, 2008 at 7:18 pm
Chaia,
Thanks so much for bringing this up. I think you highlight a few severe defects with the university’s French program. In an attempt to break away from the really standard book-based intro language programs (where you learn grammatical rules in a fairly logical order and vocabulary in sections organized by theme), Penn’s French program has become, well, not really a program that teaches you French. Instead we’re left with some sort of disjointed “cultural study” that puts more emphasis on creative writing than on the useful basics of the writing in the language. I actually took all four intro/intermediate levels at Penn (110, 120, 130 and 140) and really experienced many of the same frustrations you mentioned. In addition, I found myself thoroughly unprepared for the 200 level classes on the Penn in Tours program. I have also recently decided to not pursue the French minor I had originally intended to do, after discovering that 202 was so similar to the 100 levels.
Anyway, it really is a shame that more hasn’t been done to fix these issues. Thanks again for writing this article, hopefully some of the right people will read it.
Georgette
November 25th, 2008 at 12:18 pm
“These were not ordinary freshmen; they were freshmen blessed with extraordinarily vast knowledge of the French language and accents like angel dust dipped in whipped cream. I was doomed.”
Wait, so you couldn’t handle that there were people who were more talented than you in your class? And that is a reason you don’t like French? Sounds like someone has a bit of an inferiority complex- what a GREAT reason to not like a subject “the other kids are better than me”!
November 27th, 2008 at 7:14 pm
I am planning to major in both French and Russian, and have had more than a year’s experience in Penn’s French department.
You write, “French 121 met every day, dashing my hopes for a class-free Friday and complicating my already daunting schedule. I suffered through the mind-numbing workbook assignments and ludicrous class activities of the entry-level course.” Unfortunately foreign languages, unlike most other academic subjects, require a huge amount of work and repetition. If you want to be fluent, you have to repeat the same type of structures over and over again, and you have to spend hours every week practicing speaking. From this post, it seems like you did not want to put in the amount of effort that a college-level language course requires.
Next, you complain about the creative compositions that your class required you to write each week. I know that at the beginning of my course, I was also extremely skeptical about these assignments. But I found that they forced me to find words and structures that were not necessarily brought up in class, as well as allowing me to find a personal writing style. I cannot verify your claim that the most scandalous compositions got the highest grades, but in my class (and in almost every other subject I know), grades were based on both creativity as well as grammatical correctness.
Finally, I have to agree with Syd’s comment. The fact that there were freshmen who happened to be better than you really bothered you? Maybe they just didn’t mind having to have class on Fridays.
January 8th, 2009 at 4:43 pm
I had the opposite experience. I found Penn’s French classes a refreshign change from high school. My high school French experience involved copying grammatical rules and conjugating verbs –and not much else. We spoke in english and it was little more than a grammar, vocab drill session.
At Penn, we did something that may seem revolutionary: we actually spoke in FRENCH….the whole time. We wrote essays, did group projects, discussed books and films- you know actually COMMUNICATING in french. Grammar took a backseat and I learned far more in a semester at Penn then I did in three years of high school. Communication is the key to language acquistion-things like grammar and vocab will follow naturally once you are forced to communicate in the language. I felt penn did an excellent job of this and it was one of the most rewarding experiences I had as a penn student.