Feeling cynical about France

I want to preface this by saying that, in general, I love my year abroad in Paris and I really wouldn't have it any other way. I could not imagine staying at Smith for my junior year.

But some days/weeks are trying. This is one of them.

I am taking a course called "Théâtre à Paris", in which we read the texts of plays and then go to watch the productions. It's a great course because I know that I'd never take advantage of the many plays here otherwise.

The professor, on the other hand, is not so great. He corrects our grammatical/syntactical faults constantly, even sometimes while we are giving a presentation. I understand that some professors like to interrupt a presentation to ask questions, that's fine, but to correct our language skills? I find that more than a little bit annoying, because it's very difficult to finish up your thoughts after that. If the interruption actually has to do with the subject matter of the course, then it's fine. However, if it's something banal like "you should have added '-ons' to that verb conjugation" it gets old, fast. Not to mention it wastes time.

He needs to understand that we're there to learn about theater, not phonetics. Sure, a phonetics course would be useful, but we're not taking one. I appreciate that he wants us to pronounce things correctly, but I don't appreciate that he takes too much of class time doing so, straying from the real topic at hand. Besides, correction should be done politely and tastefully, without snide commentary like "How can you not know this after months of being in Paris? This should come naturally to you!"

Speaking of which, he addresses each of us using the "tu" form, which is the informal form of "you." Normally, I don't mind this, but it's not typical for a professor and with him it's starting to sound more and more condescending. ("Prononce-le bien!" "Pourquoi tu prononces le 's'?")

He asked me to read a text out loud today. By the end of it, I almost cried. "Mais tu prononces toujours la fin des mots où il ne le faut pas! Pense à ne pas le faire!!" [But you pronounce always the endings of words where you shouldn't do so! Think about not doing that!!] --- He could have said the same thing in a more polite tone of voice... the way he said it made me feel as if I was so dumb, as if I could just think about not doing that, as if I was so lazy for not simply taking the time to think about it.

Not just that, but he also started to bang his hand on the desk and occasionally yell "non" every time I did pronounce something wrong. Return to primary school, anybody?

I don't think he succeeded in making me want to pronounce things better; if anything, he's pretty much diminished my self-esteem and made me really not want to say anything to him ever again.

Oh, and one more thing: the entire class is composed of Smith College students. And he's apparently been teaching it for many years. I'm not saying that he should be used to it by now, but rather that he should have learned to correct our stupid, annoying American accents in a less outdated fashion. And if they annoy him so much that he can't stand correcting them politely and without his little rants, then he should think about teaching elsewhere.