Education: Angers, France (CL)

Tuesday is my busiest day. On Tuesdays, I wake up at 6 to be able to eat breakfast and get ready before leaving the house to walk to school at 7:30. My 8 am is a bit of an unorthodox literature class. We learn about surrealism by using surrealist methods to write poetry in small groups, bouncing ideas off each other while eating breakfast together. Sometimes we lose track of the time and I'm late to my language class, which lasts for two hours, where we read articles, watch video clips, and have traditional grammar and vocabulary lessons. After my language class there is an office hour with our language professor where we can ask for additional work or check in with her about our mémoires, but this is not something that needs to be done each week.

Most weeks I have about 3 hours off for lunch. Sometimes I eat at school and then go home and nap. At 2:30, I go to my philosophy class, where we read extracts from certain philosophers, and then consider an abstract question, which we discuss in small groups and then debate. In the 2.5 hours before my evening class, I usually go to the library and try to work on homework, sort emails, or make to do lists. My evening class is from 6 to 8. Our professor lectures and then shows us examples. It's nice ending the day by listening to opera or piano music.

I've been thinking a lot about how I'm in class twice as much here, and while I do feel busy, I don't feel nearly as overwhelmed as I did last semester at Allegheny. Here, the credit hours a class has actually correspond to how many hours you spend in class each week. A 3 hour class means you spend 3 hours in class each week, so that I am actually in the classroom for 18 hours per week, compared to being in class about 11.5 hours per week last semester. But I was thinking about a moment I had last semester, when having seen a visual depiction of the daily routines of famous creative people, I decided to map out my own routine.

Sleeping is green. Work of some kind is pink. Yellow is leisure time. Orange is exercise (or in my case just walking to and from an appointment in town). Blank is other.

One of my friends looked at it. "You have less leisure time than Sigmund Freud," she said, looking back at the routines published on the site. "And Freud was on a lot of cocaine." And here's the thing: that's normal for many students in the United States. And even our leisure time isn't always leisure time. I often do homework for my next class while eating lunch.

So now that I've given an example of a busy day here in Angers, let's compare it to busy days at Allegheny, as described by my Google Calendar. I have class at 9 am. As soon as I get out of class, I have to walk to an appointment in town. After the appointment, I rush to a ballroom class, which I attend to make up for an absence in contra dance I missed because I was writing multiple papers that were due that week. I speed back to my house to microwave some leftovers and carry them with me to my next class, which I am late for (and being late means taking points off your participation grade). I sit in the back, feeling uncomfortable and rude for eating in class.

Then I've got an hour and a half before my next thing, which I planned to use for homework, but end up making and eating dinner with my roommate, and I feel guilty about losing an hour and a half of time when I'm already behind. (Any time I'm not working on something for school or my jobs I feel guilty because I know how much I have to do.) Then I have a meeting for one of my jobs. Immediately after, I have a meeting for a club which I can't miss because I'm secretary. Then I get home and it's my night to do dishes. Some nights I don't eat dinner until after 9:30 pm because I'm working. One day I tell someone from work that I only have one hour to give her that week to work with her on her major project and she gets upset because she needs a lot of help, and I feel as though I can't tell her that by giving her an hour of my time, I'm taking away an hour from my projects I'm already behind on.

After weeks or months of sustained activity like this, some nights I just don't have the energy to do my homework. On one day of running from place to place for 13 hours, I try to write a lengthy paper due in a few days and end up falling asleep in an armchair instead. The night before it's due I pull an all-nighter.  I email several of my professors asking for extensions because I have so many major projects due at the same time. One of them responds that if I meet with my advisor and the counseling center and then come back and meet with her again she might be willing to consider giving me an extension, but she doesn't want to be unfair to the other students. I stare at the email incredulously. If I can't find time to write my paper when am I supposed to find time for three separate meetings?

Out of curiosity I googled university tuition in France. A bachelor's degree costs about 190 euros per year. The minimum wage is 9.67 euros per hour. The living cost is higher here, and my professors have talked about how university is very difficult for French students, but to me it seems like it maybe isn't the amount of work that's impossible. It seems like maybe it's just difficult work. I prefer that. That seems manageable. Perhaps it's difficult, but I can deal with difficult, especially if even on my busy day, I have enough time to go home and take a nap.

Now for some facts. School is required until age 16 here. 80.5% of the French have had at least some secondary schooling, and 58.3% enrolled in tertiary school. 7% of the population aged 18-65 is illettré - meaning that they were educated in France but for whatever reason have not mastered reading and writing. It was declared a national cause in 2013, and since then there has been more dialogue about it, and talk of "combatting shame" and approaching those who exhibit symptoms of illettrisme.

I don't know how much of this depends on my specific professor, but education here seems more individualized. Sometimes my professor will touch on a topic, and ask who needs additional practice with it. She gives exercises to those who raise their hands, and then they can be turned in to her to be corrected. Education here also seems more public in some respects. My language professor asks people why they were absent in front of the entire class. She also will stop what she's doing to tell a coughing student to go to the doctor. Mistakes are sometimes addressed in front of the entire class as well, by name - "I noticed so-and-so made this mistake on the homework..."

Florence discussed French snobbery last week. She says the French often think of intellectual pursuits as being better, and think people are throwing themselves away if they don't pursue those. She said that if her son were to tell her he wanted to become a plumber, she would tell him that he would have to work hard, but that he should go for it. She recommends following the technical school track as far as possible, and says that a good living can be made that way. She has a lot of praise for those who work with their hands.

My host mother, Annie, implicitly gave me some advice on education and career paths by talking about her daughters. She talked about how the economy is today, and said she pushed her girls, so that they were always the first in their class. One of her daughters went to a prestigious school and then worked in the hotel business, which suited her, she says, because she likes luxury. She pointed out the importance of being realistic, and finding an achievable career path in a field you like reasonably well.

As for my personal experiences in this system, I've noticed that how pretty things are really matters here. We've been doing a lot of writing summaries for language class, which are about the length of a paragraph, but have a break and indent as though for a new paragraph for each individual point. Just by looking at the paper, you can see where the introduction, three main points, and conclusion are. Our professor has told us that French professors won't read work that flows over into the margins of the page, that has scribbles, that doesn't have adequate spacing between the lines, that's hard to read, and that overall isn't pretty enough, and has said that from now on she's going to do the same for us.

The French write on graph paper. That was my first sign of how much they value pretty work (bad news for me!)

And of course, grades: there is no such thing as perfection. Everything is graded out of 20. 10 out of 20 means you pass, and that's the goal for French university students. 12 out of 20 is pretty good. 14 out of 20 is good. 16 out of 20 is very good, and in the French education system, is pretty rare. 18 out of 20 is never seen, but the mark is called "congratulations from the judges." Different professors grade differently, and because CIDEF is a separate program from normal university, things are just a little bit different for us in terms of grades. I got a 16/20 on a vocabulary test because we're not graded as though we are French.

We just had a week of tests, and it was bizarre for me getting some of them back. On my composition that I wrote for my language class, I only got a 13/20 written on my paper, alongside the words "good, good work, well structured, good arguments, but vary your vocabulary more." It was very strange to me. To me that number looks like I did something wrong, juxtaposed with a positive message. I suppose the idea is that there's always room for improvement. I began wondering what one would have to do to get a 20/20. Perhaps when given a fill in the blank vocabulary quiz you would have to sit down and write your doctorate on the subject right then and there (although perhaps that's only an 18/20?). I'm not too worried though, because now that I'm more familiar with the expectations for my work, I think I can begin doing better.

I believe mémoires are a common type of assignment here. They're longer papers worked on over a period of time, like a thesis or a final project that you start working on at the beginning of the semester. For my language class, I have to write a 15 page one by the end of the semester. It must have (but not included in the page count) a cover page, a summary, a table of contents, a bibliography, annexes, & illustrations. I've had final papers with those elements before, but never before have I started working on it in the first few weeks of class. It truly is like a mini-thesis on a topic. We will even have to defend it.

Hopefully, by the end of this experience, I'll go back to Allegheny better able to organize my work and make it look attractive, because those are not my stronger points right now. And having to defend my mémoire will be good practice for the senior project. Perhaps having to deal with 13/20s will also help me to relinquish some of my problems with perfectionism (And thus with procrastination? We'll see.).