Apparently I’m retarded. People have left comments on my blogs, and I have said nothing about them. I wasn’t ignoring you, I didn’t know they were there. Ooops. I will try to check on that more and answer. Sorry.

Teaching gets better a little each day. I have no clue how to tell what the kids really know and what they don’t. It’s kind of like trail and error for me. I don’t want to be over their heads. My 10/11 year old class today didn’t know the alphabet. Which they are supposed to know, according the “official French standard”, by the end of their first year. But it’s coming along.

Next week is Halloween, and I only have each class once (instead of the usual two seesions), because they get a week and a half vacation for Toussaint. I am so excited to do Halloween activities with the kids.

Today for my History of Literary Paris class, we walked around Montparnasse. It was really cool, we saw cafes and theatres and buildings where writers, painters, and other artists lived in and frequented.


It was an area frequented by John-Paul Sartre, and we went to the Cemetery of Montparnasse and saw his grave, where he is buried with Simone de Beauvoir.


We also saw cafes that were frequented by Ernest Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald, and saw from a distance the café where the two writers first met. (It’s the café with the red sign).


We also snuck into an apartment building and saw (from the outside) where Gauguin and Modigliani had their studios.


Along the same courtyard, the artist Pascin lived. After his death, his wife killed herself by jumping out of the window into the courtyard.


We also saw the Carrefour Vavin. This area has four incredibly famous cafes where artists gathered: Le Dome, La Rotonde, La Coupole, and Le Select. If they were an artist, famous, and in France in the first half of the 1900s, then they probably hung out there.



I am in awe of the historical places I visited, just in three hours.

Our professor is so sweet. He is giving us a ton of information. I asked him if we were going to be doing much with the Existentialists, and he said no. I explained to him that my little brother was studying philosophy, and was interested in Camus, for example. He said that although he wasn’t going to cover it in class, he would bring me a paper with information about different important places. He knows a lot, this class is turning out to be awesome.

And the weather was awesome for our field trip. Pleasant and sunny. I think someone talked to the one responsible for the French weather. Thanks for arranging that.