Gratitude

I was packing up my bag in my 7^th grade class this evening when one of my students, Agathe, approached me.

Recently, my students had learned the present perfect tense, one of those tenses in English that I use all the time, although up until a couple years ago couldn’t tell you why I used it or what it was called. To form the tense, you have to use the past participle, something that is especially hard in a language like English where most past participles seem to be irregular as opposed to following the rule. To try to help, I had typed a list of the most common irregular past participles, their verb base and the verb in French and given each student a copy of the two-paged document (about 2000 CFA, $4 to photocopy) today in class.

When Agathe walked to me, I noticed she was holding these two pieces of paper. She gestured to them and then, slightly curtsying (as students are expected to do when talking to professors here) she said, “Thank you,” before running off to meet her friends outside the classroom.