Yo ho, yo ho

Peur du jour- 29 Fevrier 2012: Pop midterm on maritime trade

Happy leap day, everyone! As you all know, 2012 is une année bissextile (I like the English phrasing better...).

Anyways, my Grand défis course is giving me plenty o' stories to recount. Today marked the first class with a new professor (it's kind of complicated, but the professor who was teaching Wednesdays is now teaching the Tuesday class, the Tuesday prof will be finished with his portion of the class, and we have a new professor for Wednesdays). I was excited to see that he was holding a stack of papers Is it a syllabus? Maybe an explanation of our final assessment? Something to read?As my mind (which is thirsty for some good ol' carolina schoolin') raced through all of the marvelous possibilities the professor said that today we would be doing a synthèse. A synthèse is a specific type of paper that all of the French know how to write which involves the synthesis of many documents to respond to a specific question (like a DBQ, for all of you AP scholars out there).

The subject: maritime trade

Most of the documents were just big charts showing sizes of ports and traffic flows of world trade and the ratios of road transport to train transport to boat transport around Europe. So, I'm thinking this can't be graded, right? Did anyone else know about this? Is this a pop-midterm? And the French students are getting kind of antsy. They actually stopped talking for a period of about an hour to work on this paper and feverishly asked questions about what certain words meant or why more information wasn't included in a specific chart. Jason (the other UNC student in the class with me) and I were considering asking the professor for some sort of alternate assignment or at least the chance to take it home and work on it, but I think we both realized it would be best to just dig in and do it and talk to the professor after class.

It was around the hour mark when they started talking. And then we realized that either the French are so laissez-faire about talking in class that they even allow it during tests, or that we were most likely just doing a practice essay. Upon talking to the professor after class, this synthèse was, in fact, "pour pratiquer."

But I did do my best to navigate around a maritime trade essay. And the new professor seems very nice and helpful. So all in all, it was a good class!