today was the first day of jj’s internship. i accompanied her to the marais, to the office. she is in a really cool neighborhood. she is at a stage where she still wants a little guidance, but doesn’t want to be seen with a parent. so i dropped her in the courtyard of the office and waited a few minutes there until it was clear that she had gotten in. she will be doing model making with a master model maker in the paris office of the japanese architect, shigeru ban. as i have already mentioned, he is the architect who designed the “centre pompidou” in metz, france, with the french partner jean degastine, our friend’s brother. when she came back, we were all interested to hear how it had gone. p asked, “did they tell you ‘t’es null!’ like the french teachers?” [you are zero!]. she said that she had spent 2 and a half hours making a toilet out of paper and when the master came to look at it he said “it’s a catastrophe! start again!”. this is even worst than being told you are zero. but then she did it again and he said it was better. so that was an improvement. even encouragement. half of the office is japanese and half is french. they speak english to each other, so we figured jj would end up speaking english most of the week. she said that in fact, she is speaking mostly french, since the master is french.
i think the whole concept of the internship is great. all these 9th graders go out into the world and get a taste of what working at a job is like. 8 hour days. actually, today she arrived at 9 and was supposed to leave at 5, but kept working with the rest of the people. at 6:00 she said, “i have to go home”. the secretary in charge of her said, “oh, yes, yes, you should go home”. the kids choose something they think they might be interested in and even if they decide it’s really not for them, they’ve learned something valuable.
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