Back to school

So I had my first day at school. In the class, taught by a Ms. Li, there are six women and two men (including me). There are two Vietnamese (one man and one woman), a Balinese, a Thai, a Russian, a Japanese, and a Korean. In the class we give self-introductions which takes about an hour (the class is two hours long). I was surprised to hear that most of them had been studying Chinese for under a year. But I'm cool with this. Sure, they are using some words I don't know, but I understand the general gist.
Then the next hour comes. The teacher hands us a sheet, all in Chinese, of how the class is to be carried out. I can read some of it but am anxious that I miss something important. She talks about 'tingxie.' Of course I know what that means because we used to do it all the time in France (dictée or dictation). She goes on to explain how the class will go, but I only understand a few words and have no idea about the general meaning. I start to get a little nervous. Actually, one of the requirements for the scholarship I am on is that I have to get grades of at least 80 percent. So that's where my anxiety was coming from.
Then we play a game where we each get cards with words on them and we have to explain the word without saying it and others have to guess what it means.
I don't know if it was the words they had chosen, but I suddenly felt like that time when I was six years old and learning how to swim and I just went into the deep end of the pool and freaked out and almost drowned (I didn't almost drown, but I thought I did). It wasn't just the fact that I didn't know most of the words, it was also that everyone was just speaking so comfortably and I was there, like a sitting duck. Now I know what my Junior High School Japanese students felt like when I tried to make them talk.
Ms. Lin said if anyone felt the class was too difficult she had no problem with letting them go. And that was my cue. As soon as the class was over, I went over to her and told her it was too hard. She explained to me calmly and clearly what it was I had to do.
I didn't understand any of it. (Actually, they had explained it in the orientation meeting, but I was, let's say, chemically imbalanced at the time.) After struggling a little, I finally understood the words 'sixth floor'.
I went to the sixth floor and told them I wanted to change classes. They asked me if I had talked to my teacher about what level I needed to be in. "Maybe you should talk with her about your level.' They said. So I went back upstairs to the teacher's office, found Ms. Li, and asked her what level she thought I should be in.
"Maybe you need to be in a group which uses book two," she said. She went and got the book.
I really didn't want to go to a group that uses book two. This is what I get after two years of university-level Chinese? She asked me if I knew the characters. Yes, I said, it's just that at my school in France we were learning simplified ones. "OK," she says, and starts to walk me to another office.
When we get to the office, they say that since I am a new student I need to stay in the class for at least two days to try it out. And that's that.
I think what really annoys me is that the school I went to in France, Inalco (allegedly the best in the nation for teaching Chinese), never taught us how to really speak. After I left the teacher and looked at my textbook and textbook two, I noticed that I knew about 90% of the words and most of the grammar. But it was just the combination of the inability to speak and the difficulty in listening which prevented me from participating in the class. And it's probably because at Inalco the most we had to do in class, in terms of communication, was nod our heads when the teacher asked if we understood and present a short dialogue which we had memorized in front of the class (JET teachers, does this ring a bell?)
Ultimately taking a few steps back will be good for me because it will consolidate the information I know and I'll actually learn how to speak it in a regular conversation. In the end, that's why I came here.