Studying French (or On Doing Hard Things)

"It is impossible to live without failing at something, unless you live so cautiously that you might as well not have lived at all – in which case, you fail by default." - JK Rowling 

A few months ago, I sat in the audience of Washington Hall at the Romance Language Awards ceremony. I was one of three people in the French section not getting a French honors cord. I watched my friends give beautiful speeches about how they truly fell in love in French and how much enjoyed reading the prose of French authors. These speeches were gorgeous and I admired my friends for writing so gracefully. They made me yearn for their passion for the language, their delight in French literature, the wonder they found in philosophy. Yet, I couldn’t stop thinking about how they didn’t seem to line up with my experience of French at all.

(Which is probably why no asked me to write a speech).

My speech would probably have been about crying. Because as a French major, I cried a lot. I cried the first time in my academic career that I saw a C on my report card. I cried the first time I failed a paper. I cried when my professor posted our grades publicly for a whole semester (like why would someone even do this I don’t know?), and mine was always the lowest. I cried when I got waitlisted for study abroad. I cried when I got accepted finally, but then a professor told me that I probably wasn’t good enough to go (I did anyway). It seemed French was always knocking me down, leaving me stressed, confused, and wondering if I would ever be good enough.

I could write a speech about the weekends I gave up to edit papers over and over again. I could write about the time a horrible French class left me paranoid and terrified and made me stop enjoying anything French related for a year after. I could tell you about all the times when I told myself, “Today, I’m going to quit. After this class, I’m going to the Romance Language office to drop my French major.”

But each time I did, something crossed my path to stop me. Somehow no matter how much I wanted to quit, something called me back. Till registration my senior year, I had to truly decide. I was 4 classes away from finishing. I knew I could finish the French major, or I could take more English and Education classes that interested me. In the end, it was my desire to teach that helped me say yes. I knew that a lot of schools were hiring French teachers and I wanted to be more hirable than just an English teacher. So, I did the hard thing, I signed up for classes that would let me get a Supplemental Major in French.

There is a general consensus, in America, but at Notre Dame in particular- to shy away from thing you aren’t naturally good at. If you are struggling with a class, you drop it. If you aren’t cutting it in your major, you switch to something else. We like to keep up façades that we are successful at everything, while secretly wondering if we are the only ones who struggle. Following the things that give you all As, makes easy to keep up the façade that you are competent, smart, and put together. But you lose out on the real lessons that come with education.

Through my struggle with French, I learned a lot. I figured out to utilize resources. I found websites that would help point out grammatical errors, which helped me start to self-diagnose the common errors I was making. I bought books in French and English, reading things twice so that I could feel competent and confident about the text before class discussions. I learned to ask for help- from professors, classmates, and even friends back in France. At the end of my senior year, I got an A- on a French paper, a job offer to teach in Nice, France (which I had to decline because I already accepted the offer in Ireland), and a minuscule shout out in a French professor's retirement speech. I honestly had never been more proud of myself.

If you can afford it, study what you love. I will never argue against that. But if what you love, or what tugs at your imagination, or what sparks your excitement, is hard for you, stand tall in the face of failure. Study things that challenge you, that humble you, that make you cry. Study things that aren’t pretty or easy for you. Study things that let you inherit a growth mindset, instead of fixed one. Hard things teach to keep trying, to lead lives where anything is learnable.

In the meantime, we need to look at our education system and see where we can find more space for exploration, discovery, and risk taking. So that way, students don’t have to sacrifice diving into subjects that are interested in, that they want to explore, for having a GPA (and in some worlds this means a shot at medical/dental/grad schools). We need to foster teachers and professors who see students for more than grammatical structures on the paper, but partners in learning, and students who are truly trying their very best to succeed. We need to see how, in even places of higher education, we can make learning more like play- were we can take risks and try new things- without fear of failure, or more importantly, in acceptance and the ability to move beyond it.