u/_sharksnark

My French supposedly is around a B1 but I haven't practiced in a hot minute, so excusez mon anglais. I have no problem finding materials to immerse myself and practice my listening and reading, but I'm a bit stumped on the best strategies to improve my productive skills, specifically when it comes to catching and correcting my mistakes. I'm no fan of AI, especially in the Language Arts and Humanities, therefore it'd be awesome if you have any suggestions that don't rely on "conversing with ChatGPT" and the likes. I'm already on r/language_exchange and looking for french language programs in my area, but I'm from a small town nowhere near any French speaking countries.

Thank you for your help :)

For context, I'm an aspiring History teacher from Germany in her very final stretch towards graduating. I've been very depressed for some months and this has finally spread towards my degree choice. I wholeheartedly believe that students should learn the history of their home country and an outline of world history to get a grasp on today's political situation, but my degree (esp these last months) has entirely desillusioned me with the field. In short, it feels like teaching history is nothing but presenting students with info that they could have retrieved from wikipedia themselves and then telling them "that's how it was y'all". In the end, my five years of studies (standard amount for becoming a HS history teacher here) was nothing but that: reading lots of academic articles to write papers about entirely niche topics that were neither particularly relevant (yes let's compare the Athenian and Spartan constitution for the billionth time) nor challenged my critical thinking too deeply, because it always felt like I knew too little on any given subject to add anything new to the conversation.

With History being an overly saturated choice of subject, I'm just even more miserable about my current situation. I know that to a degree, all subjects in secondary education boil down to presenting students with information that they could retrieve online but need to even be made aware of first, but since I'm also studying ESL, that subject at least feels like I have some skills I can pass on to my students. I don't know. It all feels so useless.

ETA: Just wanted to emphasize that I posted this to gather arguments to convince myself that teaching History isn't as useless as it feels to me currently, hence why I prefaced that I'm currently very depressed (which isn't something this sub can fix in any way, I just wanted to be confronted with something other than my persistent negativity to not forget that my depressed mind is in fact not the authority on what is important in life.)

I highly appreciate everyone's takes on the importance of teaching history!

Basically, I'm currently writing a roleplay with a friend in the PJO/HOO universe. We just set out to have an exchange/joint training event between Camp Jupiter and Camp Halfblood (currently, a cohort of maybe 20 Camp Jupiter students is visiting Camp Halfblood) and I'm utterly stumped for ideas. How would y'all imagine an exchange between them? Activities, dynamics, shenanigans, any input is highly appreciated :)