First Real Grade (I Think)
Today I got back my first actual graded assignment from a French professor (well, I’d gotten one back last week, but that was just a draft that I proceeded to revise, so it’s not final). My wonderful little mini-analysis of texts for — surprise, surprise — my Analysis and Comprehension of Texts class did not exactly go brilliantly. 12/20, or according to the handy little conversion chart I found online, this is about a B. So, yeah, I wasn’t (and am not) thrilled. Not terrible, of course, and I’ve got perfect attendance in that course and the professor keeps on reminding us that she prefers that we hand in work even if we haven’t done it properly so that she has something to grade. And I’m relatively sure that I’ll do better on the work handed in today. I wouldn’t really be too panicked if it wasn’t that, what with the strike, our grades are going to be based on just a few assignments.
At least I properly class-participated today, something I haven’t done in that class for a while. I was easily one of the more vocal students in the discussion and most of what I said, I got right. Which is how it’s supposed to go, after all. The week after we come back from Spring Break, we’re going to have an in-class analysis, joy of joys. On the brighter side, the professor said she’ll allow dictionaries in class. She’s railed time and again about the boundless sins of bilingual dictionaries, though I personally think her problem is more with the rampant misuse thereof; half the problems she’s cited as examples are things that wouldn’t happen if someone took the time to note that a word was a verb, not a noun, or that it was being used in the singular, not the plural. And she does have legitimate concerns about the utility of the more portable-sized translation dictionaries in a class devoted to in-depth analysis of the written word, which can really be summed up as such:
That’s not a dictionary…
THIS is a dictionary.
At any rate, I shall much enjoy coming to class with my Nouveau petit robert. 2500 pages of pure Frenchness:
In other news, my Discovery of Paris project team picked up our dossiers fresh off the press today:
Isn’t the cover pretty? I designed the cover. Well, I didn’t pick the color. But I did all the other stuff. Which looked quite a bit better on my computer screen, since I printed it out at the MICEFA office on a laser printer designed for quick, efficient production of documents; all the painstakingly calculated partially-transparent bits got converted into fields of dots. After being scanned into the school’s machine, the pictures behind the header (a lovely juxtaposition of a new block of the Avenue de France and the Frigos) is just about impossible to make out. But hey, considering we were flying pretty much blind, turning in material that came out the other end as a finished product without any mock-ups or anything in between, I think the results are pretty satisfactory.
Interior of the dossier. My section, of course. The pictures came out pretty well; I’d had a bit of trouble adjusting the brightness and contrast once I’d converted them to b/w.
On an utter non-sequitur of an unrelated note: I saw a woman in the subway with a tri-wheel shopping cart. This pleased me far too much. I am too fond of tri-wheel designs just because they are so darned clever. See for yourself, courtesy of some Wikipedia user or other:
See? They’re all “Don’t mind us, we’re just wheels” and a ditch/bump/flight of stairs is all “Hah, wheels will get stuck here!” and the tri-wheels are like “No, don’t think so.”
Also, I’ve been noticing a lot of people with crutches lately. I mean a lot. Like I pass at least 2-3 people every day who seem to be using a single crutch. Maybe a rash of relatively minor leg injuries? It’s odd, and rather disconcerting.
Oh, and I discovered that one can fiddle around with one’s profile on this Macaualay eportfolio site of ours. I promptly changed my avatar to a proper picture of myself, since I’d apparently been issued a bespectacled, nearly toothless, pink pentagon by the Powers That Be Deciding These Things.
May 2nd, 2009 at 1:45 pm
The Pink Pentagon was a random assignment, nothing personal, honest! Everyone gets a different sort of monster until they choose their own avatars. But the new photo is much better, you’re right.
And please keep up the great work on this–not just the photos, but the reflections, the discussions…it’s all valuable and even if not many of us are commenting, do know that you’ve got a real audience out here!
When you return, if you’re willing, I hope you’ll continue with some reintegrating posts–what will it be like to come back to NYC after this experience? How will your Paris eportfolio develop (or become a piece of?) an ongoing eportfolio?
Anyway, just thought I’d chime in! 🙂
May 3rd, 2009 at 5:58 am
Figured the avatar was random… Though I suppose I could imagine some way-too-bored programmer coding an elaborate system for choosing a geometric monster face based on the number of letters in a person’s name or such. Haven’t given a huge amount of thought to the broader possibilities of the whole eportfolio thing, I’m quite new to it. I expect I’ll poke around a bit and see what sort of stuff other people put up and so on.