We have begun a French course every Monday night at 8pm. We want our community to be more integrated with the people of Lausanne and knowing the language is one of the most critical skills to seeing this happen.

Peter and Vanessa are graciously teaching a basic and more advanced French course for all our staff and students.

Last Monday's class was especially entertaining for the fact that we began our class with a quiz. There was no grade given for this quiz, so the pressure was off.... kind of. It still proved if you had studied the first week or not. The quiz started off with us having to be able to introduce ourselves, recite our age and nationality. This was the easy part. Then came the more difficult portion of the quiz. Vanessa told us numbers in French and we had to interpret them into “English” numbers. Sounds easy, but these weren't 1's and 5's and 32's. These were 135,649's and 356,964's. Those kinds of numbers. Yeah, that’s tuff! It was entertaining to watch the students go up to the board and write down what they thought the correct numbers were. Some got all of them right, others got one or none of them right. But it was very fun.

Vanessa is a very good teacher. She explains the information well and presents it in a manner that makes it easy to learn. By the end of the quarter we expect a hand full of the students and staff to be able to speak fluent French, or maybe just be able to introduce themselves. Hopefully somewhere in between.