Using My Right Brain

I have been thinking about how I can continue my French during vet school. It will take quite an effort but I am more convinced than ever that it is important to do so.

I've been taking large class loads each term that I've been here at OSU. French contributes a lot to that, accounting for 25% of my total credit hours. Still, the regular exercise of my right brain has proven to be amusing, distracting, and stimulating in equal measures.

Our most recent writing assignment was to submit a critique of the film "La Haine". We watched the film in class over a couple of days. Made in 1995, it is about the violence and racial issues in the French slums (banlieues) that have metastasized around every large French city. The film was made in a documentary style, although it is mostly fictional, and it was filmed in black and white. It is full of shocking violence and profanity and sadness.

As usual, the assignment was open-ended. I decided to do an analysis of the main characters in terms of classical epic tragedy/comedy: buffoon, anti-hero, thwarted hero, villain, and so forth. I won't bore you with my actual essay but I can tell you that I labored long over it. I was utterly amazed with the result--it was insightful, concise, and written entirely in another language. Since the beginning of this term, I no longer draft my assignments in English then translate. I write them from the start in French. The cognitive leap that my right brain has to make to do this is pretty amazing.

The profanity in the film was interesting. The French are so much more creative than we Puritan descendants are when it comes to swearing. A friend gave me a pretty fun French profanity handbook a couple of winters ago and I considered doing my write up on the cultural basis of the profanity in the film. Then I figured, I'd better not push it. That might be a little too philosophical for my poor rudimentary French.

This morning I finished writing our final essay for the term. We had to write about clothing. I know, that's a pretty open ended topic as well, and not one that I find particularly engaging. And we had to use the conditional verb tense at least five times. The conditional is an easy tense to conjugate and it isn't an unusual one, but when you have to use it, it can seem a little forced. I have been struggling with this assignment for a couple of days. I couldn't get enthused about the topic until I came up with the hook: imagine what an extraterrestrial would think about clothing (ah, there's the conditional tense!) if he visited Earth 500 years ago and then came back again today. My essay has the proper mix of humor and cynicism that I have maintained in all my writing assignments. The prof will love it.

In a metaphorical way, using my right brain for all this creative writing in French gives my left brain a bit of a rest. I'm stuffing all sorts of vertebrate anatomy and biochemistry and animal physiology things in there and it gets a little crowded and stuffy. Writing about extraterrestrials observing human clothing styles...that's a bit of fresh air.