Occupy the tram back to centre-ville!

J'ai fait une gaffe! (I made a mistake) I'm not exactly sure if I have people anxiously waiting on the edge of their seats on Wednesdays thinking that I am going to post (probably not), but if there are those people, I am terribly sorry that I forgot to post yesterday. I was kind of in a funky, homesick mood and all I wanted to do was climb under my covers (because it is trop froid in this house) and read Harry Potter à l'école des sorcières.

Peur du jour- 11 Janvier 2012: Knowing when to walk out 

Yesterday I attended two fairly lousy courses at the lovely UPV III. For those of you who don't have a facebook or haven't seen the pictures, here are some lovely pictures of the lovely university that will illustrate how lovely it is.

These pictures are fairly generous too. Add clouds of smoke and rowdy French étudiants to the mix and it is just downright charming. But, I am not in France to attend a beautiful University (I already have one of those!). I'm in France to learn the culture and become 10x better at speaking French and have the adventure of a lifetime. UPV III is part of this French culture. Students don't pay very much in the form of student fees so the result is a university on which there is not constantly construction and renovation. So I've come to grips with the less than idyllic campus. But yesterday, I was forced to confront another difference: French classrooms.

On Tuesday I went to a great course. The professor was easy to understand, he wrote very clear notes on the board, and I found the subject matter interesting. I'm thinking "Great! I have this course if I need it, but I also want to go to two courses tomorrow that sound just as interesting!" Wednesday morning rolls around and onto the campus saunters a bright-eyed bushy-tailed Kathleen at 8h00, ready for Droit du travail (labor law) and Crises Internationals (International Crises) . I went to the front row of the classroom and sat with my pencil poised to write down every French word emitted from the professors mouth onto my weird, French lined paper. Here are some differences I noticed:

1. Class time is more of a suggestion: At UNC, you can count on there being some people in the classroom at least 10 minutes before. The professor (unless they are just coming from another class or something else) is usually there 5 minutes beforehand. In France, it's more likely that the students will arrive between the starting time and 10 minutes late and the professor will arrive between 5 and 10 minutes late. Those of you who know how freaky I am about being on time can probably understand how troubling I found this.
2. Bibliographies (reading lists) are about 10 miles long. In one class I went to, the professor spent 45 minutes of a 3 hour class talking about what we should read. On the list was the complete memoirs of Henry Kissinger. In another class, the professor pulled out a law manual. I know that as a foreign student, I'm not expected to be able to navigate through these texts. Our program director told us to ask the professor on which texts we should focus. However, I don't understand how the average French student (who I'm told studies far less than the average American student) gets through these lists. The answer: they're not. 
3. Attention is optional: Something that I've heard is common and which I have experienced is that students do whatever they want in class. They talk (loudly), file their nails, text, and do a myriad of other distracting things (I swear I could smell nail polish). In this particular class, the professor didn't even reprimand them. She just said "there are a lot of you, so if you could maybe talk a little less, that would help me save my voice." Professor Kathleen would be kicking students out of class or at least making some sort of effort to lessen the riff-raff.

So, you're in a (3 hour long) class and its terrible. You're thinking "I could be running some errands, buying lunch, working on homework, or doing ANYTHING other than sitting here, taking notes for a class in which I have no intention of enrolling, surrounded by students who really don't care." If you find yourself in this situation, do what I did in both of my classes yesterday: leave during the break.

I have never dropped a class or skipped a class or missed a class in my college career. This isn't exactly on the same level as any of those things, but leaving the class on the first day during the break is a little uncharacteristic of me. My new phrase is "When in Montpellier."

As my friend Tyler would say, "the moral of the story is": Follow your gut. Don't waste your time. Don't be too worried about offending someone that you're likely never going to see again. Don't ever take a class where the professor spends 30 minutes talking about how great a guy Henry Kissinger is.