Minding my CM's and TD's

I’m still alive, didn’t get food poisoning from the cat food. :) Well, I have just been very busy with the student strike and having no courses. Indeed, in the end we did start it and it went on for about three weeks. [grunt!] As much as I’m for political activity I do mind tearing myself out of bed at 6.30 to arrive for my eight o’clock course and discover that it was all in vain. Though, I’m sure I brought it all upon us with my pessimistic speculations.
Anyway, we have fortunately passed that, the anti-Sarko movement has more or less died out (not that we have become his ardent devotees in Sorbonne but we’ve understood we can’t do anything about him).

However, I’m not that thrilled to get back to all the courses. In Sorbonne for every course you have an hour of a cours magistral which is a lecture with a professor and two hours of a travail dirigé which is a course in smaller groups. The idea of the latter is to have more time to go into details and be more interactive, since you don’t get to ask questions during the main lectures.

Well, it would be too good to be true. What we really do in TD, le travail dirigé, is that all students pick up a subject and do a presentation, un exposé, on it. So eventually it is two more hours per week per course listening to lectures. Imagine having six courses which would make all in all about twelve exposés per week. So after two months I’ve heard – struggled through to be honest – quite a few of them.

The quality has been varying. Once one student was so into his subject that instead of lecturing for half an hour he kept on going for one and a half! Luckily it was interesting. Most of the times the exposés are very dull because students just run through their dozens of pages of notes and only after finishing them stop and ask if we have any questions.

Sometimes the performer would give you an impression that there’s something rather stimulating coming, he or she would start with an introduction still proceeding in a humane pace. And just as you lull yourself into the illusion of an interesting presentation, the student would stretch his hands, grab his pile of notes and start lecturing with the speed of light. That is when you have what some people call a near-death experience; names, images, dates flash past you and turn into letters and numbers without logic. And if you after half an hour are still conscious enough to find your way out of the class, you can survive anything.

To be fair and honest, sometimes presentations are very good, you actually enjoy yourself and you are delighted to observe that our generation is not totally lost and is competent enough to step in our fathers' shoes. So if you now miss something it’s either you’re having a bad day with your French or you’re having a face-à-face moment with your desk because the night before you just couldn’t stop after the first dose… but then it’s your problem. Just hope you have a nice friend with some proper notes to copy.