Last Monday I took my first French class in over a decade, at the Alliance Française a couple of blocks from my house. I suddenly realized that, in the time since my last class, the internet happened. In a big way. And boy did it produce a lot of vocabulary. I looked at the page of my workbook and thought, "What the hell is a mel?".

There were deeper problems, however. I didn't know how to express any date in the twenty-first century because the last time I said a date in French it began with "mille neuf cents." It had become so automatic that I was paralyzed with indecision when I had to begin a year any other way.

It was also the first time I had been a student in the classroom in seven or eight years, and it's really hard to go back to being a pupil when you are used to being the teacher. I had to remind myself constantly that when you are the student, you shouldn't be doing more than 50% of the talking in any one class....