I started school yesterday and it went great. I was intimidated on Monday because I was clueless about all school-related things: my classes, my teachers, my classmates, how to get there, how the school even worked, etc. The morning of the first day of school, my host-mom dropped me off at one of the bus stops in Lauris. She introduced me to Elsa and Léo, also students at my school. She told me to just get off when we arrived at the school, which stressed me out because we stopped at more then one school. Luckily I sat with Elsa on the bus and waited until she got off. The bus ride was a little less than an hour and I now love taking the bus. We pass by other villages like Cadenet and Villelaure, and I seem to be the only one on the bus admiring how pretty the view is the entire time.
My school is called Lycée Val de Durance. When we arrived we all went to the courtyard to find our names on a list and line up by each pillar. I was in the class Seconde 5.
Seconde= sophomore year
Première= junior year
Terminale= senior year (French high school is three years.)
Within each grade, there are a certain amount of classes, and I'm in the fifth class of the Secondes. My classmates in Seconde 5 are the people I go to all my classes with. I prefer it this way because 1) I get to know my classmates better by spending more time with them 2) I don't get lost because I can just follow my classmates and 3) we can study/do homework together. Each class also has a "professeur principal" who is your main teacher, like a homeroom teacher in American school. My professeur principal is our English teacher, Mme. Clermontois, which is helpful for me especially at the beginning of the year.
We all went to our classrooms, and she explained school policies, rules, and so on before giving us our meal cards and schedules. I have Mathématiques, Français, Histoire/Géographie, Physique et Sport, Sciences Vie et Terre (bio), and Physique Chimie. I'm also taking Espagnol and Anglais. (I left all the class names in French because they're basically cognates.) In France the schedule is also different everyday. School either starts at 8am or 9am depending on your classes, and finishes at 4pm or 5pm every day but Wednesday, which ends at noon. The half-days every Wednesday is genius and should exist in American schools.
*I'm editing this three months later in my exchange and my schedule is completely different because I added Italian, changed Spanish teachers, dropped Gym class, etc.
The whole system was confusing at first but because I'm in the first year of high school here, the others are also adjusting. We're all the same age, and we're all starting school at Lycée Val de Durance. Later in the day we took our class picture and got our textbooks. We have textbooks for each class with makes our backpacks really heavy. Here there aren't lockers and we take our backpacks to all our classes.
Yesterday was the first day of school, which was spent mostly for introductions and settling in. Today, which was a half-day because it's Wednesday, was a day for playing games and getting to know each other. We got t-shirts this morning with "Seconde 5" written on the back, and our color was light pink. The competition was to play a series of games outside, and the winning class would receive tickets to the cinema (which is such a French prize and I love it).
Part 1:
We split up into teams of three and each received some worksheets with riddles, math problems, etc. I wasn't able to help very much because my French is lacking, but I think we did well.
Part 2:
My class was super happy to have me because the next portion of the game was quizzing us on English. I was able to contribute to the team this time, and I just did everybody's worksheets for them. I'm sure we nailed that part of the game (it would be sad if we didn't; I'm American).
Part 3:
We ended the games with a scavenger hunt. My classmates and I were sprinting through the halls following the hints, and we got a lots of weird looks from the Premières and Terminales.
My class won in the end. The whole day was great because I was able to get to know my classmates, especially during the English quizzing part of the game because my classmates realized that they had an American in their class. Everyone in my class is great and I love my classmates. We each got our tickets to the movie theater, and I got invited to go with some girls in my class later this month.
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