teenage dramas and monotones

It was four in the morning and she couldn’t sleep and was listening to some great new music. The week had gone really well thus far – she had learned a lot from her first full days of classes at both the high school and the middle school. Students, for the most part, were great. Working with them in groups of three or four, she learned that they represented a remarkable range of ability levels…some couldn’t form a complete complex sentence and some spoke almost fluently. It was a great variety – peppered with many different interests- from physics to literature, to World Wide Wrestling, to American teenage shows, to poems by Keats. The students were kind and courteous, but for the most part very uncomfortable with an informal relationship with their instructor. Their lives are run on stress and striving to achieve entrance into the right university. She learned some students have officially graduated and choose to stay on one or two more years to prepare their resumes for university applications…she learned just how incredibly driven and remarkably disciplined and talented these young people are – She just wondered how much fun high school was for them. There was still the air of adolescent judgment, and cliquish relationships, but without any real feeling of camaraderie. None of the monumental and wonderful moments of high school in the states were present– no pep rallies, no graduation ceremony, no all-nighter video projects, no prom, no homecoming, no wacky nerdy dress day.

And she learned they were all incredibly curious…about the elections in America (most every French person supports, without a doubt, Obama), about what Americans thought of Sarkozy (Sarkozy who….), how life was there, were any of the stereotypes…americans are all fat and stupid, they drive big cars, and everyone owns a gun, and live in a dangerous world, ….true?

She learned that the steps in her building were made in 1606.

And she learned a few things from sam - who introduced two new French figures into her life – Jacques Brel – an amazing French singer from years ago, who’s music is plain and pure passion – about dirty life and love..
http://fr.youtube.com/watch?v=T6rvMZnWKZc,

and Michel Coluche – (perhaps an early predecessor of Stephen Colbert )– a completely irreverent French comedian who ran for president in 1981 – but dropped out of the race because the polls showed him far in the lead (he died mysteriously five years later – in what many consider a government conspiracy).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coluche - lists some of his wonderful words of wisdom about everything from government to the poor to the church to the ignorant to the former USSR.

She learned that the French manage to envelope everything –from the little minute tasks of life to the political revolutions of an entire nation – in art. Everything is done with a conscious of beauty, with tenderness- and everything painted a pretty picture. At five o’clock streets filled with old couples walking arm and arm, businessmen carrying baguettes, kids picking up pastries, pigeons crowding the steps of churches, even the monotonous and everyday was done purposefully and was elegant.

That even government communication was a thing of poetry.

she learned that the British government read verses on the radio to communicate with the French resistance during world war II. That the first phrase of this poem - chanson d'automne - told allies that the Americans were landing in France soon.

Les sanglots longs
Des violons
De l'automne
Blessent mon coeur
D'une langueur
Monotone.

Tout suffocant
Et blême, quand
Sonne l'heure,
Je me souviens
Des jours anciens
Et je pleure

Et je m'en vais
Au vent mauvais
Qui m'emporte
Deçà, delà,
Pareil à la
Feuille morte.

Translated – something like this…
The sobbing calls/from the fall's/ fiddles' moan/through my breast/languidest/monodrone.

It just seemed a little ironic to her-that the attention to taking life slowly and deliberately, of savoring each meal, each walk, each cup of coffee, each page of the paper - the enjoyment factor - was not completely evident in high school or education in France; the time that many Americans believe is one of the most lively, fun, enjoyable periods of their lives is, here, missing something significant.