Mostly Random
Ooh, wow, my 20th post. A right milestone, this is. Little to report, but felt I might as well. My lit course had its second proper class today. Of course, a lot of time was spent recapping what had been said on the first class a month ago, which was dull but necessary, I suppose, and edifying to those who are incapable of taking notes. A grad student, I believe, had been there last week to tell us that the professor would be there, and to give out the readings for today. She collected email addresses today, downright high-tech. We’re to turn in short papers on the readings for next week. The professor explained the format and where to leave them at the FLE department, because next Thursday is a general strike and unless plans change there won’t be much of anything happening. Which means, for me, a 4-day weekend. Could be worse. We ended class early because the FLE department secretary–a tireless, hardworking man whose life’s mission is clearly to help foreign students not be completely baffled by Paris 8–popped by to inform the professor that some people had decided to carry out the oft-proposed idea of blocking the university completely, and were somewhat forcefully encouraging professors and students to leave. Why they decided to do this in the late afternoon, instead of in the beginning of the school day, is a bit of a mystery. But hey, whatever. I don’t even really mind if they go for all-out blocage and put the tables and chairs in the stairwells and whatever (provided, naturally, that there’s nobody in the building who might get trapped in the event of a fire). What I do mind is when a handful of students decide to do this, because they don’t actually shut the school down, they just take the furniture from a classroom or two–inevitably at least one where I have class–and the maintenance people clear it out the next morning and stack it in a hall out of the way where the students who actually have class have to go fetch it. I mean if you’re going to do these things, don’t do them halfway, okay?
Yeah, I’ll stop before this becomes another rant. Though part of me is intrigued by the puzzle of how one might best shut down Paris 8 with furniture… given x chairs and y tables, a doorways of width b… Enh, it would get boring.
Another note on language– I noticed today that French numbers have English numbers beat in one respect: compare English cardinal numbers “one, two three, four” and ordinal numbers, “first, second, third, fourth”; and the French “un/une, deux, trois, quatre” and “premier/première, deuxième, troisième, quatrième.” English has three numbers that aren’t too similar from one form to the other, whereas French only has one. Which does make things easier, or at least more logical, which is so nice when learning languages. I say this having suffered through my first grammar test, which was a pain and which I know I did badly on. There were 2 words I knew I didn’t properly convert from present to past tense, and doubtless many others I didn’t notice. Though at least I managed to get to class on time and understand the professor’s repeated, clear instructions, which puts me ahead of some of my classmates.
For some reason, I’ve noticed most of my French professors don’t get my name right. Which is odd, seeing as it’s more or less a francophone name, or so I thought. But two professors at Hunter and 3-4 here apparently can’t wrap their minds around “Julian.” It’s either “Julien,” or “Julianne,” or an approximation of the English pronunciation, “Djoolianne.” It might be a generational thing; all of those professors have been middle-aged or older, while my one younger French professor at Hunter had no problem pronouncing “Julian” phonetically as it would be said in French. Not sure why this is so hard, though. I expect teachers used to foreign students might also be used to trying to say said students’ names more or less as those students would say them in their native languages. The combination of that habit with an apparently non-standard orthography must be too much.
And, hey, this post deserves a picture. Ummm… here we go:
Pretty church-y thing near the MICEFA office.
