The country of France has a testing system known as the DELF that uses 6 levels to classify someone's knowledge of a language. A1 means you are a beginner with little or no knowledge of the language. A2 means you've had training, know basic verb conjugations and can converse and describe basic elements in the world around you. B1 means you've got a pretty good grasp on the everyday language and can converse easily on topics encountered in daily life. B2 means you're able to discuss complex topics using a wide variety of sentence structure. C1 means you can discuss abstract thoughts and understand and discuss highly detailed topics like politics, and C2 means you are equivalent to a native speaker.
My school CLE loosely follows these guidelines when dividing students up into classes. When we arrived the first day and took the placement exam I was put into the A2 group. The problem was that my class had several students who were beginner A2s (namely the English with Alzheimers who couldn't follow along and the Lebanese woman who couldn't read and would just guess at words until the teacher filled them in for her) and several (like me) who were in between A2 and B1. During the first two weeks I got very frustrated because the beginner A2s slowed the whole class down so we weren't learning as much as quickly as I would have liked. (I eventually spoke to the director halfway through week 2 and she said she'd see what she could do). It was no fault of our teacher, Elise, because she was outstanding. Young, thin, tall, and energetic, she had short, brown hair, dark rimmed glasses, a face and personality like a cartoon character and arms that stretched from one side of the room to the other that she used like charades to help us understand the words. She spoke clearly and eloquently and would bounce from one end of the table to the other, never seeming to slow down, tire, or lose patience if we didn't understand.
Luckily, at the beginning of the third week the classes changed a lot. At the end of the second week close to 12 students went home but we got 8 new students, so after placement exams I got moved up into a B1 class with just 3 other students - Astrid, a Swiss German, Mariene, from Holland, and Jenny, an American in her 60s. (This little group is fantastic because we're all on the same level and we feed off each other and help each other out.) Unfortunately, Elise also went home because she was hired only for summer to fill in for a regular professor who was on vacation. Our new professor, Gaelle, is the complete opposite. Middle-aged, petite, and hawkish with wiry brown hair, she sends fear through our hearts every time she steps in the room. During the first 5 minutes with her my eyes visibly widened at how much she spit the r's out of her mouth and how grating her voice sounded, which she took to mean I thought she was talking too fast. She proceeded to spend the next 3 days speaking one word at a time, which didn't help our comprehension at all because we just couldn't understand anything she said whether spoken slow or fast. She puts the blame on us for not understanding and makes us feel about the size of an ant, whereas a teacher like Elise would take the blame on herself for not explaining properly. The first few days with Gaelle I was more agitated than I've been in the last month and for the first time yet did not look forward to going to class.
As much as I despise her, Gaelle does have an uncanny way of picking up on exactly what we are doing wrong, breaking us down, and building us back up. Half the time I think she doesn't prepare for class and just waits for us to say something wrong, then jumps (or pounces, really) on that grammar topic and directs her whole lesson around it. I go back and forth between wanting to strangle her in a brutal fight to the death and tolerating her because I think I will learn a lot. The result has yet to be decided.
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