First Day of Class

As I said, today was my first day of having classes. Much like yesterday, it didn't go HORRIBLY, but it was definitely not easy.

I only had two classes because on Wednesdays I have the afternoon off. I started with history/geography. This class was fairly easy to understand and I'm pretty sure most of the criteria is stuff I studied in history last year, so I'm not too worried. The class was also only one hour so it wasn't all too stressful. I explained to the teacher that I was an exchange student, as I do with all of my teachers, so hopefully he can help me out later in time.

The second class was French class. At Tigard, English is my best class, so to be put into a reading and writing focused class and not be able to do any work was extremely stressful for me. Not only could I not understand ANYTHING the teacher was saying, but I couldn't read her cursive on the board, so my notes do not make any sense. Not to mention lined notebook paper here is much different because the lines are MUCH smaller, so I couldn't even write straight. We read a passage from a book which I could hardly understand because the professor was reading so fast. Then the class was supposed to write something about it afterwords. She wrote the prompt on the board and tried to explain it to me but I could not for the life of me understand what I was supposed to write. The worst part was every time I asked her a question or had her explain something, everyone turned around and stared at me. I assume this is because this was a very simple task to do and she was talking me through it, so to them I probably looked like an idiot. And even after that, I couldn't complete the task. She asked the class questions about what they wrote and I tried to listen and get an idea of what was going on.
 She also gave us a paper that had two other passages from two different books. I think the instructions said we were supposed to change them to past tense...Again, I couldn't read anything. Eventually I just started writing in my journal because there was no hope for me starting any of the work.

This is how school is in the beginning of exchange. I know it will get easier and I keep having to remind myself that this is totally normal.I've received some very helpful words of encouragement from some friends back home and I think I'll be able to tackle the rest of this week alright because I have a Rotary weekend to look forward to. I also have 3 acquaintances from school who have been helping me so far, so it's not like I'm completely lost! Hopefully I'll get the courage to talk to more people and ask more questions.

Glad I was able to get TWO blog posts up today! I'll definitely write more after this weekend.

But until then, a bientot!

~Effy