Thankful for My Professors

Although French teaching styles are often quite different from American teaching styles, I'm often thankful for my professors' skills and grateful for all they do to help us learn French.  Today I'm especially thankful for the professor in the class called "Compte Rendu".  In this class, we listen to recordings in French on various topics and then answer questions and write reports on what we heard. It's a real workout for the comprehension skills, which I definitely need!

The topics have been getting gradually more difficult, and the last topic was a bit discouraging for me: it was on the electromagnetic emissions of cell phones ... or something like that. :-) Anyway it was a fairly complicated topic that isn't usually part of my daily conversation even in English, so was even harder in French.  Our topic for this week didn't seem much easier: the symptoms and stages of measles.  I don't have much of a medical vocabulary!  We listened to it a few times in class last week, and none of us understood much of it.  However, we were allowed to work on it at home, and after working on it a while, it gradually made more sense.  Then the professor said in class today that the other half of the class which meets earlier in the week had found the topic very difficult, so she took more time than usual to go over the whole thing with us and discuss the difficult vocabulary.  Then while we were filling out the questionnaire and writing the report, she let us listen to it about 20 times.  As I listened and wrote out my report, I was almost surprised to realize that all the professor's efforts were paying off and I was actually understanding almost the whole recording - which just a week before had made almost no sense.  Thank you, Madame Senges, for working so hard to help us understand French, and thank You Lord for providing professors who are good at what they do!