plus légère que l'air // lighter than air

Seeing as it's getting to be exam time for everyone and their mother (except, of course, me), I thought I'd provide you with a little insight to my academic process. Thus, I present you with:

How to Not Fail French University: A Plan

1. For the two classes that I have at la fac, it is necessary to milk my "Je suis une Américaine stupide" status for all that it's worth. In theory, this will get the professors to take pity on me and give me a decent grade. The majority of French kids don't get 15 out of 20, so I don't really understand how my university thinks that making a 15/20 an A constitutes as a proper scale.*
2. For my French class, suck up to Madame K. and do extra exercises to make up for my disastrous attempts at la grammaire française and the fact that I have never seen half of this grammar before.**
3. Give up my France & Europe class as a lost cause and rely on my Cultures, Institutions, & Mentalités Politiques grades to cancel it out. This might actually be possible thanks to Monsieur R.'s generosity. As for Madame G., I have no hope of her ever getting over her narrowminded viewpoint that understanding the big ideas are not as good as regurgitating shit verbatim.

*Writing my papers might also be a good idea.
**By sucking up, I really mean, "Maybe talk in class once in a while."

There is much less required work involved in the French university system. At the same time, it is just as hard, if not harder (and not just due to the whole language barrier). It's incredibly different from the expectations that we have as American students. For example, French kids aren't expected to create a thesis in their papers and defend it--they're actually not supposed to. More often than not, they end their papers having talked about three different possibilities, without knowing what the "right" answer is.

What I mean to say is that I still have no significant free time. Just lots of dead periods. And I've been incredibly bad about filling up said dead periods with French instead of English.

Basically, I'm just a failure. At French, I mean. Sob.