Epilogue to the Québec story

I never realized until just now that I fell off posting Québec updates on my blog. I know I notified everyone by e-mail that I came home in October and why. Very ironically since I'm writing this one month into the pandemic, my biggest motivation for coming home was social isolation. The people with whom I had hoped I would connect up there were busy with their own lives. And I didn't have a peer group up there. There were no adult students, even though I had been told that there were and that the traditional college-age students were in a minority. That wasn't my experience at all. By the second week in October there was only one class I was doing well in. So I moved out of my apartment in Trois-Rivières on Wednesday morning, October 7, and was back home in Portland that night.

My one remaining course was cancelled for the week, so I had a week at home to decide what to do. And my decision was to commute up and finish the one course I was still enrolled in. I drove up Wednesdays, stayed in the very reasonably priced Trois-Rivières Comfort Inn on Wednesday nights, had class from 8:30 - 11:30 Thursday mornings, then came home. It was very well worth it. The course was "Difficulties of French Grammar." I'd wanted to take an advanced French grammar course for a long time. And the professor, in his final year of teaching before retirement, had a reputation for being outstanding. And he was. Brilliant, witty, kind, supremely well-organized and clear. I learned so much. And he was especially generous to me and another student. She and I took it seriously. We sat in the front seats, took notes, laughed at his jokes. By the end of the semester, he had given us both several of his books from his private collection as he was cleaning out his office. I worked very hard in that course -- mind you, a course about features of French grammar that French-speaking university-level students find difficult -- and am probably prouder of getting an A in that course than anything else I've ever accomplished for myself.

My routine for October, November, and December was to sub at the school Monday and Tuesday, head up to Trois-Rivières on Wednesday, have class and come home on Thursday, and sub on Friday. Once the session was over on December 12, I settled into subbing nearly every day. I had had such a good experience in the one course I did finish that I wanted to find a way to keep it going. So I switched majors to a bachelor's degree in translation. The appeal was that the entire program is done online, that I could do it part-time, and that all students in the program pay the same tuition that the Québec residents do, or about $350 US per three-credit course. So I enrolled in two courses to start off, a French stylistics course and the required course of ... "Advanced English Grammar." Needless to say, I'm carrying an A+ in that one!

I think I prefer being in a class with the professor to learning online. But I can't deny that I'm still learning and doing it very affordably. Will I make it all the way to a degree? Hard to say. But I'm enjoying it for now and that's all that matters.

And even though my experience of living up in Trois-Rivières kind of crashed and burned because of the isolation, I don't regret one second of it. I learned a lot, I'm still learning, and am grateful that learning will continue.