Alliance Francaise

Teaching = 4 stars
Administration = 1 star
Alliance Francaise’s North York location is a temperamental French diva. She is good at her craft, but quite bothersome to put up with.
Similar to the Hollywood studios that resort to trusted tropes for a reboot, I turned to established Alliance Francaise with great expectations to reboot my French language skills. I have spent a considerable amount of time in French speaking parts of the world, but don’t have the requisite fluency to boast of.
Much like the recent Spiderman reboot which was such a damp squib that there’s another Spiderman reboot in the works, Alliance Francaise didn’t quite reignite the French spark in me.
I will admit that my instructor was good: he was enthusiastic, knew his stuff but his pacing was a bit off. He went slow in the beginning and then sped up towards the end just as things got a bit more complicated. Since he was a Francophone, it was hard for him to explain things in English when students were completely lost.
Good actors can’t carry a movie alone. Directors shoulder much blame for terrible movies.
The administration at Alliance Francaise gave pathetic direction and didn’t have the gall to apologize.
Since my class spanned the end of 2014 and January 2015, the campus was understandably closed over the holidays. We were told that Sunday classes would resume on Jan 4^th.
I showed up at 9:00 am on a cold and pathetically grey January 4^th for French conjugation only to find the gates of education slammed shut.
9:30 AM came and went by, but the gates didn’t open. By this time, my instructor had showed up as had students from other classes. My instructor was nonplussed since he was told that the campus would reopen on Jan 3^rd (just like the Spadina campus) and had already taught his first class of 2015 at the Spadina location, as he had expected to.
I waited till 10:00 am and left. Till this day, no one really knows what happened, just like the series finale of The Sopranos or Lost.
We were supposed to have a make up class; however that got cancelled as well.
Unlike the Spadina campus, this location doesn’t have much in terms of additional resources like a library or events for students.
My experience at Alliance Francaise’s North York Campus was akin to watching the Wachowski siblings’ recent endeavors: a little bit of fun, a lot of disappointment.