Random rant
The funny thing about leaving your comfort zone and learning to get comfortable elsewhere is that your life becomes one big, restless and uncomfortable blur. I’ve often heard horror stories about how difficult it is to say goodbye to a place you’ve come to adore. For me, however, saying goodbye to Europe wasn’t too difficult. What proved to be and still continues to be impossible, is the never ending period of adjustment that follows the end of travelling and returning home. After my 8 month sojourn in France, life in Jamaica, the other country I called home, became uncomfortable. Little by little, I started to notice all the things wrong with everything; with me, with my family, my relationship, my friendships. My life. The way I spread my bed began to grate on my nerves and seemed to be in need of a complete do over.
As a French language student, getting the opportunity to travel to a Francophone country is a blessing. I came back home ready to tackle the task of learning and was a bit anxious to step back into my well worn shoes of being a student after taking a gap year. It was there that the real discomfort started.
I began to realize that very few of the things I was learning in my well structured classes had actually helped me when I was lost in Switzerland, frustrated in Paris and beyond annoyed, standing in front of a classroom filled with French teenagers.
As I’m being rushed by my lecturers to read article after article, novel after novel, watch video after video and to research this and write that, I wonder who had ever thought learning a language this way could be effective. How could learning everything in this way be effective?
Do I appreciate my university experience thus far? Yes.
But I hardly ever have enough time to ruminate on any brilliantly written novel my lecturers have prescribed, as I am already obligated to have my fingers bookmarking chapter 16 in another book before I have even finished the former.
It’s such a disheartening thought to think that in a few months, after I got all the grades, and received the million dollar piece of paper from my university, I will have taken very little practical information with me after 3 years here.