I was a French major in college, and people often asked me What are you going to do with that?, a question that’s rhetorical for Humanities majors and one we ignore for as long as possible.
I sometimes answered with “Speak French”, but that didn’t apply to everyone. If the lack of any meaningful French-speaking environment didn’t pose enough of a challenge, there was always someone willing to make you feel like shit because you didn’t speak like a native after a few years of study. I knew a lecturer who was notorious for doing this; he made fun of his students’ French. He considered himself above teaching introductory classes, destined for great things, and eventually he could no longer reconcile his infantile narcissism with the struggling life of an adjunct lecturer. He applied to business school at the last minute and works for a company in France today. In the States, he’d just be another worker bee, but of course in France he’s somehow a “special” worker bee, living not the life of yet another wage slave, but une aventure formidable.
But even without those people, every French major knows the following experience: studying French for several years, and then going to France, and realizing you can’t follow a fucking word. Simply put, it takes balls to bring your foreign language out of the classroom laboratory, and if someone does that, don’t they deserve encouragement rather than ridicule?
Of course, buried under all this were some legitimate complaints. Take my senior capstone class for instance, full of French majors who couldn’t speak a word of French. They read the English translations of the assigned readings and on the whole we just sat there with our professor, whose enthusiasm diminished and frustration built to the point where she played The Beatles’ All You Need is Love for the class in an attempt to get us talking, at least in English. But no one took the bait. Everyone sat there quietly and her passion for teaching breathed its last.
Another, equally rhetorical question comes after you graduate: why did you major in French? People often ask that question with a kind of incredulity. Out of all the majors you could pick, you chose…that one?
Why’d I do it? Because it challenged me. My high school didn’t prepare you for college. Like any good public school, it prepared you for life in the working world. I was raised to see going to college as something prestigious, but while colleges pretend to have standards, the truth is they’ll admit just about anyone who applies, only to have them weeded out later.
As a general rule, if they tell you upfront that an endeavor is “what you make of it”, run for your fucking life. You’re better off going to a vocational school and learning some tangible skills than taking on mounds of debt for a degree that (supposedly) qualifies you to speak a foreign language no one outside campus can understand.
High school replenishes the servant class. None of us were prepared for college-level work, and I made a D on my first college French test. My high school French teacher wasn’t much help. The woman didn’t really speak French so much as she spoke of French: it’s much harder than Spanish, it’s the most difficult Romance language to learn. A bully who openly played favorites with her students, she spent the twilight of her career teaching only English Lit, French removed as an elective due to lack of interest.
I took the “D” as a challenge to get better, and five years later, the first question forced me to give an answer. So I did.
I was going to France to teach English.
The Assistant d’anglais program was not only going to save me from the working world, but several other French majors too. We prepared our applications, all our documents, gathered our reference letters and sent everything to the French Embassy in DC, with the assurance from our professors that everyone gets in.
I was certainly confident. March, 2008, I told friends in family that I was going to France. I had Lille at the top of my list, followed by Caen and Rouen. My plan became clear: I was going to spend two years teaching English in France. After that, I was going to do my Master’s and PhD in French Linguistics at a university in France, before returning to the States to seek a tenure-track position. I would have finished my Doctorate before my current age (32), and would spend the rest of my life climbing the academic ranks in a cushy job doing what I loved.
About a month after sending in my application, I realized I’d forgotten to include a passport photo. I emailed the woman at the embassy about it, asking if I could send my photo separately. Here’s a highlight of her encouraging response:
First of all, you needed to include THREE passport-sized photographs… the instructions on page 1 of the application explicitly say to staple a passport-sized photo to each application…
No, you cannot send the pictures serarately, there are simply too many applications coming in, it would be an impossible task to attempt to find your application and match it up with the missing photos.
She did show mercy, and emailed me the next day, telling me to send in the photos. I rushed them out and waited, assured by people who’d done the program in the past that everyone gets accepted.
Then May came. Two girls in my capstone class received their acceptances via email. I remember checking the teaching program forums and receiving a heap of conflicting information. Either…
a) All acceptances have already gone out
or
b) Some acceptances now, some later, so if you haven’t received yours yet, don’t panic.
I chose b, panicking more, and I eventually emailed the woman at the French Embassy, who informed me in an unsigned email that all acceptances had been sent out. The email a few days later confirmed it: France was out. And here I was, a week from graduating, no plan.
Not getting accepted to the Assistant d’anglais program was a pivotal moment in my life. How pivotal?
It’s possible that if I had simply included passport photos with my application, my daughter would not exist. A strange thought, but who’s to say for sure? Our professors assured us that everyone gets accepted, but what none of us understand was that there were too many people, and not enough openings. Someone was going home disappointed, and I was one of them.
Do I regret not getting picked? For years I did, and I think some small part of me always will. I enjoyed learning French, and although I can follow French podcasts fairly easily, I know that I will always lack the finer idioms and slang and natural speech that only comes from living in-country for an extended period of time. Me listening to Europe 1’s Libre Antenne is my attempt to justify all the time I spent studying French. It can’t all be a waste, can it?
On the other hand, there were the people. When I panicked and applied to grad school afterwards (asking one of my profs for a big favor), the lecturer I mentioned earlier tried to torpedo my application. A pathological liar, he referred to himself as a “faculty member” and a “Professor of French”, and I love the plausible deniability “Professor of French” gives you. Lecturers who only hold a Master’s degree are not professors, even in the longest stretch of the word, but referring to yourself as a “Professor of French” rather than a “French Professor” gives you just enough plausible deniability so that if someone calls you out on your bullshit, you can claim that you weren’t committing professional fraud, you meant professor in the sense of teacher, and that you taught French.
As I consider reenlisting for another tour, I’ve thought about what might’ve happened if I’d gone to France. Maybe my French would have hit that C1 level, and maybe I’d be on the tenure-track today, living the life of the mind. Maybe.
Or maybe I’d have to refer to myself as a “Professor of French”.
In the meantime, I’ll listen to Libre Antenne and keep my tools sharp. Why? Because of what I know.
I know I’m doing twenty years in the Navy in the same way that I “knew” I was going to France after graduation. In the same way the people kicked out by the Enlisted Review Board knew they’d get a pension after twenty.
When you get down to it, you don’t know a fucking thing.
