last year, I was here in Sun Valley, Idaho with my mom and my sister, and we were having conversations about maybe going to France for the summer and doing a trimester in a French school. Just talking about maybe going to school there for a little bit got me pretty excited because it would be a new experience in a new school with new kids and teachers. I was so excited when my mom decided to do it.

When we got to France, I was excited to visit the school one day. When I walked in and saw how big the school was and how many kids were in it, I was a little bit overwhelmed at first, but I ended up being so thrilled. A few days later, we went to go shopping for school supplies. We got all of the stuff we needed. There was a ton of stuff, which was pretty overwhelming at first, but we were still excited. A day or two before school started, we started organizing all of the school stuff that we needed for the first day, though other than supplies, we didn’t have that much in our bags because the teachers haven’t given us any of our textbooks.

My sister didn’t come with me when I went to visit the school, so she didn’t really know what to expect. My sister started school a day before me, and she came home after the first day and thought it was super fun. She was really excited that she made new friends. After I heard that my sister had a blast, I was even more ready to get started. The first day of school wasn’t hard at all because we were going from class to class and just settling in and talking about what we would learn about during the trimester, which was easy and not stressful. During the entire first week at school, we were just doing that sort of stuff and the teachers handed out textbooks. I also got to know the kids in my class, which was cool, and I already had some friends in the school, though none of them were in my class.

After about a week or two, it started getting harder. I had a ton of homework at night, all the difficult classes, and long days. On the longer days of school, our backpacks were full of textbooks and journals, and they were super heavy. We didn’t have lockers, so we had to carry all of our stuff everywhere we went. I was really tired of doing the same thing over and over again every day, and so was my sister, but we had committed to staying so we just pushed through the difficulty.

During this experience, I think I became more resilient because each day all of the teachers gave us hours of really hard homework every night. There were even a few teachers who I really disliked and who disliked me, which was also very annoying because they would always get me in trouble. I realize now that I wasn’t prepared for how hard it was going to be. I thought it was going to be easy since I could speak the language and read in it, and even though I couldn’t write very well, I still thought it was going to be easy. When it was over, I was so relieved that I was done with that school and all the hard and tiring work, and I was super happy that I could come back to the States and see all of my friends again and go back to my old school.

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