One way ticket to here

It's amazing how a seemingly insignificant action can become the catalyst for a life-changing event. 

In my case, the action was the first and only time I ever dropped out of a course.  It was my first year of my four-year undergraduate degree at the University of Western Ontario.  I was majoring in English and had registered for a French course because a second language credit was obligatory for  my program.  I went to my first class, took an instant dislike to the arrogant, condescending professor, dropped the course and signed up for course on Ancient Greece instead.

Fast forward two more years.  I was finishing my third year with one more to go and that French course was still looming in the background.  I had one more year to take the course if I wanted to graduate.  It so happened that Western is part of the Explore program and has its French Immersion School in Trois-Pistoles.  I realized that I could get the credit I needed from Western without having to set foot in the French Department and the government would pay for it too.

So one day in May I hopped on a train with 200 other students and headed east.   I got off that train expecting to earn a badly needed credit in French.  Little did I know that my life would be transformed too.

How ironic that I live at least half of my life in French now when I had stubbornly resisted that French course throughout my undergraduate years!  I graduated with a B.A from Western, went on to travel to Thailand, Malaysia and Indonesia,  enrolled in a graduate program  and completed M.A. in literature at McGill .  And  here I am now at the Cegep de Rimouski, teaching English to an amazing group of language students!

 I never did have a career plan.  My plan was just to continue what I loved doing: reading and studying. But life has a way of creating opportunites that you seize because you recognize fateful moments of your destiny.  Although I have travelled on many buses, trains and planes since that fateful train ride to Trois-Pistoles, I never did use the return portion of my ticket.

This week we will examine the Maclean's annual university rankings issue.  You have already made an important decision when you decided to study Languages at Cégep de Rimouski.  In the spring you must make another life decision:  do you apply to university?  what program?  where? do you travel? when? where? with whom?  do you work? where? doing what?   We will take a close look at what Maclean's has to say about universities but at the same time, I can attest to the fact no matter what road you choose you will meet with twists and turns,  obstacles andmost importantly, uncharted surprises.

It's Greek to me

Sometimes while I'm writing I must pause to think of the perfectly precise word for the occasion.  Sometimes it takes me half an hour just to come up with a title.  I savour le mot juste.  I adore my well-thumbed, falling apart, 25-year-old paperback thesaurus.  And all of this word obsession is for my mother tongue! 

But what happens when I must speak or write in French?  I yearn to be able to communicate as effectivley in French as certain panelists I listen to on Radio Canada or on Bazzo.tv.  The challenge is that once you are very comfortable in a second language it takes a lot of motivation to improve your vocabulary.  It's just so much easier to rely on the tried and true formula  (did you get that idiomatic but over-used expression?) to express ourselves.  If you are highly motivated to increase your word power, however, you will be rewarded with the satisfaction of accomplishment.

How about taking a vocabulary test at http://www.englishcorner.vacau.com/vocabulary/vocabulary.html
These activities quizz you on your mastery of the Acadmic Word List, a list of more than 500 words that every university student should master.