a tentative Plan B for next year

August 1, the New Moon, and Mercury direct (if that reference means nothing, pick up an Old Farmer's Almanac and read up; weird stuff happens during Mercury retrograde and resolves when Mercury goes direct). August 1 is also the Pagan holiday of Lammas, which celebrates the harvest. Perfect day for an update. I'd been waiting to post until details were finalized, and they're not, but here goes anyway!

Recap: I learned on July 10 that l'École internationale de français (ÉIF, International French School) was cancelling the advanced level courses for fall due to low enrollment. My whole next year's plan had been built around that. So I needed a new plan. My four options:

1. Enroll in the regular French courses at the University, not the ÉIF. Super-intimidating.
2. Enroll in another ÉIF program which consists of one-on-one tutoring, 15 hours a week for two weeks max, with the same teacher. One of the teachers in this program is the one who has been my teacher for the past three summers and is fantastic. So that sounded good.
3. Look at other programs at other universities in Québec. There are good ones at McGill in Montréal, Laval in Québec (City), and Trois-Pistoles, in, well, Trois-Pistoles (115 miles north of Allagash, Maine). I'm actually an alumna of the one at Laval.
4. Pack it in and come home.

I considered #3 for about one minute. I already have an apartment in Trois-Rivières with a lease until April 30, 2020. Québec law does not allow the breaking of a lease. So the apartment is a sunk cost, and thus option #3, although I'm aware that it's not necessary to invest more money just because of a sunk cost, has been eliminated. On to option #4.

I considered #4 for about two minutes. But as I've noted before in this blog, I'm feeling very strongly called on an intuitive level to spend more time at the Université du Québec à Trois-Rivières (UQTR) and in the Mauricie region (upper central Québec, named for the St-Maurice River). VERY strongly called. Something is up there for me. If that sounds crazy, so be it. I've spent my whole adult life making decisions on intuition more than facts, and it has served me well. Indeed I've learned that if I don't pay attention to my intuition, I regret it later. So option #4 to pack it in and come home has been eliminated.

Option #2, the one-on-one tutoring. I asked my teacher about this possibility. He checked and found out that I could do it, but with no guarantee that I would get him as a teacher as the ÉIF assigns teachers to students by seniority. I didn't want to take the chance on not getting him as a teacher and spending 30 hours over two weeks by someone I didn't know and may not hit it off with as much educationally and personally. So option #2 has been eliminated.

Option #1 is left.
Here's the list of reasons NOT to do it.
• More expensive.
• More isolated; the ÉIF is a community, a school within a school, and with option #1 I'd be just another commuter student.
• Tougher academic environment. It's a giant step from the ÉIF to taking regular UQTR courses with native-French-speaking classmates.

So why am I applying to do it anyway?
• The academic advisor of the ÉIF suggested it and said I would be able to do the work.
• My online/Skype tutor over the past year got her BA from this program and is getting her masters' in it now. She is one of two francophones who know my capacity in French better than anyone and she said she was "certain" that I could do the work. I asked her if I would be the only adult in the classroom. She said not at all, that she (mid-20's) was one of the youngest graduates of her program.
• I met one of the professors in the program through my summer program. She encouraged me to take her class.
• The advisor suggested I talk to the department head of the undergrad French department. So I made an appointment with him for my last morning of my summer program, which was Friday 7/19. He is very highly regarded so I was looking forward to meeting him.
It went great. He was utterly encouraging. He praised the quality of my written and spoken French and said that they had admitted non-francophone students with less proficiency than I have now. He went over the list of courses with me and gave me a copy of the letter they give to newly admitted students to the department with info about a big first-day meeting. He recommended that I apply as a matriculated student and pursue either a "certificat" (30 credits) or a "baccalauréat" (90 credits - university in Québec is 3 years of undergrad because they do two years first in a "cégep," something like a community college or junior college). I don't really need a degree, but the encouragement felt great.

So I left that appointment, and left UQTR and Trois-Rivières immediately following, on a high. It felt like I had gotten a new direction. I headed home that Friday and filled out the online application on Monday. Applying to college in Québec is a lot cheaper and easier than in the USA. It took me an hour, and most of that was spent looking in my apartment for my Ellsworth High School and University of Maine diplomas which the application requested a photo of. No test scores, no letters of recommendation, no resumé with academic honors and extracurricular activities. Just transcripts and diplomas. I knew right where my transcripts were, but not my diplomas. Thanks to this, I have everything in one place now!

So now I wait. I have an e-mail acknowledgement that my application has been received. I have the code and security questions to check the status of my application online -- which I have been doing a ridiculous number of times a day. Probably not unlike high school seniors around the country. Other than that ... I'm set. I have my apartment. I have a bank account. I know my way around. I know what my class schedule will be as soon as I'm admitted and sign up for it!

It's a little nerve-wracking to be waiting to be admitted. But I don't expect anything to go wrong this time. I'm considering the fact that the department head endorsed my applying and enrolling as a sign that things will work out this time!

And I have to be honest: I know I will work harder and learn a lot more this way than I would have in the ÉIF. I was already one of the top students in the ÉIF and it would have been very easy for me, more like a vacation than a college semester or year. The department head I met with told me I was "déjà trop bonne" ("already too good") at French for the ÉIF. Sounds like this is yet another case of things working out the way they're meant to work out!

To give me a reason to add a photo, here's how I met the professor from whom I'm planning on taking a class. Her name is Patricia Powers. Despite the English-language name, she is 100% Québécoise francophone. French people with English names are not unheard of up here. She is very high-profile up here; she is on Radio-Canada (Canada's French PBS; the English is the CBC, or Canadian Broadcasting Corporation) as a "chroniqueuse," a great word for which there is no exact English equivalent; it's like a podcaster but on the radio, not on a podcast. The masculine is "chroniqueur." She's big in the entertainment community and the UQTR community. She teaches French both in the ÉIF and the regular UQTR French department. And the icing on the cake, or as they say in Québec,  "le cerise sur le gâteau (the cherry on the cake)," is that she is a very warm and lovely person. She was looking for two ÉIF students from my summer program (for adults) to interview for a short video ad to put on the ÉIF website and wanted two people who spoke French well. (I'll share the link as soon as it's posted.) She picked me and a woman from Edmonton, Alberta who actually was francophone as a child but lost a lot of her French due to going to anglophone schools, having mostly anglophone friends, and marrying into an anglophone family. So she sounds francophone when she speaks. Here is a photo taken right before the interview. Left to right are Patricia Powers, me, and my classmate Sylvia. Who says older women can't look fine? I think this is an amazing photo of all of us. Notice how she's touching my hand and leaning in; very québécois. She encouraged me to take her fall course "expression orale," which is public speaking. I can't wait! I really enjoyed taking public speaking in high school and college in English, so doing it in French will be a blast!