Dear all,
On Monday evening I went round to my friend Halle’s house so
we could spend a bit of quality time together before she heads back to America
for the summer (this Friday). She’s been
a great support to me this year and we had a good chat over dinner and I slept
overnight, then we had American pancakes in the morning with maple syrup and
fruit. It was a welcome break (even
though I’d just got back) as Michèle’s daughter was staying over with her two
small children who decided to scream and cry, get annoyed and make lots of
noise constantly! This made me glad that
the kids Michèle looks after during the week aren’t that bad in comparison.
We said goodbye to Andrew from our house this week, so to
see him off I made lasagne, we went to the cinema, had a cake from the bakery
and then Manqi organised having breakfast with him on his last morning
(although he ate his in his room and then came down to join the rest of us!). He was eager to be off back to England and
has done well to stick it out this year as living abroad was very difficult for
him. I think it’s stretched him in a
good way.
On Saturday Martin and I had to invigilate exams (yes, Saturday) for
the students from our department in lecture theatres. I did two, one at lunchtime and the second
one from 5-6pm, both in the biggest lecture theatre, with enough space for 281
students to take an exam (though thankfully a lot didn’t turn up – it would’ve
been a tight squeeze). What ensued in
the exam hall was a cultural shock to me.
Before we turned up half of the students had entered unauthorised,
and the head of department was despairing of them saying half of them had taken
answer booklets and scrap paper to write notes on even though they were not
allowed, so could we go and take everything back off them while he got them to
sit in rows with a space between people.
They were all chatting away merrily and more students arriving by the
minute. Bags with them, mobile phones
still out, coffees/cans of drinks on the benches, sitting next to their friends
(no seat allocation). No rules were
stipulated at the beginning except ‘you’re not allowed any other materials
except your pencil case’. It took us a
while to get all the papers handed out to a couple of hundred students and they
were still talking until they got their papers.
When they did make a start they went quiet. It was a multiple choice paper with 40
questions which some people had finished in 15 minutes and wanted to
leave. We said they couldn’t leave until
30 mins had passed because it would be too disruptive otherwise (seeing as
other people would have to stand up to let them out). Well, when our colleague gave the word that
they could leave, (at least) half of the exam hall stood up and left, chatting
as they went!! Giving the others some
noise to start whispering amongst themselves and leaning across to share
answers. Unbelievable. The ones leaving partook in this too, or some
would be saying goodbye and ‘bon courage’ to their mates. We only had 2 students out of 200 left at the
end of the hour! It felt like there was
a real peer pressure to get up and leave.
In the second exam, one girl took a cookie out of her bag
and ate it. I had to have a stern word
with some students that I suspected of cheating, to put a stop to it. Apparently it’s well-known that cheating is
rife in these exams. A lot of the
teachers don’t seem to care and the feeling is ‘let’s try and minimise the
damage’. Manqi said that as soon as you
walk into an exam hall you can tell if the teachers there are going to
invigilate well or not.
Both teachers who had set the papers admitted to me that
something in the paper was a certain way so it would be easier for them to
mark. Can’t blame them too much as they’ve
got so many papers to mark in a short timeframe but it seemed a bit of a lazy
attitude that I’ve not come across so much in England. Our teachers seem to take more of the view
that the exam paper must be ‘x’ way so as to best test the students or so as to
allow the students to show what they are capable of etc. Of course exam papers in the UK are
scrutinised by external examiners too which means they can’t just do whatever
they like. We also chatted to some of
the good students after the first exam, who said that they hadn’t seen half of
the content in their lessons, and the teacher said he had never seen 20 or so
students that were sitting the exam in his classes. Oh my.
The other interesting thing this weekend was the elections
of course. France has a new president and
in the Rennes area (strong backing for Hollande) there’s a lot of optimism
about the change coupled with a pessimistic ‘we’ll see’. I went along to the local polling station
with Loic and Manqi on Sunday at 7pm to see the votes being counted and Loic
got involved. There were 5 ‘offices’ in
different classrooms with 4 tables set out, 4 people at each, and they were
given the envelopes in batches of 100. It
was six hundred and something for Hollande versus two hundred and something for
Sarkozy for each of the ‘offices’ for our polling station. There were quite a number of votes which were
void too. One person had managed to put
Marine Le Pen’s name into an envelope, which made everyone laugh!
They hadn’t even finished counting votes and we found out
the result via the Internet that Hollande was the new president and we got home
to see Sarkozy was giving a goodbye speech.
I was baffled, I knew there hadn’t been time for all the votes in France
to have been counted in one hour. Well
no, the actual figures were confirmed a lot later that evening but they had
announced their president on forecasts and exit polls or something (If someone
actually knows how it’s done maybe they could explain it to me)! It was so tight between Hollande and Sarkozy
that Loic, Manqi and I discussed how strange it would be if the vote swung to
Sarkozy later that night.
Fiona x
