Sorry, sorry, sorry! This week has been pretty stressful so far and that's my excuse for not writing at all these past few days!
I began the week in a bad mood because on Monday I should have been in a class called "Histoire de la langue". However, due to the Sorbonne's silly planning and organisation, I couldn't find the room for my seminar! Either, they changed the room without broadcasting the news, or I wrote down the wrong room number for that particular class when choosing my modules. I searched for half an hour for the wrong room before considering double-checking the boards, and by that time it was too late for my 1 hour long class. Oh well, will try again next week!
Anyway, so far I'm really enjoying most of my lectures! :o) The course modules that I have chosen for this term are perfect for me, and it's not an obligation for me because I love learning about all the topics we are covering this term! That is one of the reasons I was so annoyed about missing the History class on Monday; I was expecting that to be really interesting! :o) I think my favourite class at the moment is the Tuesday morning "Civilisation de la Renaissance". It is practically non-stop story-telling for the entire lesson, which makes the bombardment of information easier to absorb. The lecturer clearly loves his subject and with him being a Shakespeare scholar, I feel a certain affiliation with the man. Unfortunately he seems keen to drop me in at the deep end with my French language lessons; at every available opportunity he bursts into a stream of very fast French which he expects me to decipher and respond to! Well, hopefully he'll forget about it in a few days or so.
Yesterday afternoon made my brain ache in the same way; my teacher is proud of the fact that she can translate her lessons from English into French and vice versa, so suddenly, mid-sentence she will switch languages and it confuses ALL of us, even the bi-linguists! This is especially tough on me when I have my very English days; sometimes I'm sure the French words jump right out of my head! It HAS made me realise, though, that it is necessary to maintain regular bilingual conversations in order to remember all you know of a language! I hope I'm able to keep up my French like this when I come back to England. If not, I might have to move out here! :op Something productive did come out of the afternoon's lesson though. . . I now have a presentation organised for the 20th November on the topic of "How women are represented in Chaucer" and more specifically for my specialisation, "How Chaucer's representation of women in The Wife of Bath's Tale (Canterbury Tales) differs from the typical descriptions of female characters in Old and Middle English texts". May sound boring to you lot, but that is an absolute DREAM of a topic for me! I'm doing a joint presentation with my friend Diana, so we'll be sharing the work-load a bit :o) I'm quite looking forward to tackling the subject, actually!
Today I had my first class for my Masters module, Shakespeare! Just before the seminar started, I started talking to a girl outside the room called Noémie who was also in the class. It was refreshing to have an entirely French conversation for half an hour, and then I was pleasantly surprised to see that the lecturer for the Masters class is none other than the Renaissance professor! It made the lesson extremely easy to bear, especially as it is (understandably) much more difficult to follow than my other classes. I am in a class with people who are at least 2 or 3 years older than me! Throughout the whole class, the tutor made constant references to different Shakespearean plays, many of which I have not yet read or studied. I felt pretty dumb during that class and I have vowed to read some more this weekend to try and catch up with the others, who all seem to know what they are talking about! That's one thing I've noticed about the Sorbonne; the students are much more hard-working, and committed to learning here! I don't know whether it is due to the Sorbonne being such a fantastic institution, or whether it is a French thing, but it is incredibly awing to see how devoted they are to their studies :o)
This afternoon brought took an irritating few hours of my life; they are gone and never coming back :o(
The English literature class was taken by the same very annoying lecturer from last week, who, as Siri pointed out, looks like the old tortoise from the Never-Ending-Story film, "Morla"! He has a faux English accent which only appears in some words, but most of the time you can tell that he is very French. He seems to have singled out Holly and myself because we are English and he has deigned to remember our names, but not many others, which is slightly embarassing! Last lesson, there were less than 10 students in the class (probably because not many knew that the lessons had already started), but this week the classroom was absolutely choc-a-block! For the second week running, Holly and I found ourselves separated by people, so Siri and I passed her notes along the table. Yet again he seemed to be stumped by the uncommon English words in our answers to his silly long-winded questions (which I think is ridiculous, what with him being a qualified English tutor and all!) so he glided over our comments and made silly remarks such as "Blake is not a cloud." I mean, come on mate! He is giving us waaaaaaaay too much material with which to mock him! Siri and I chose our presentation topic for this module too; we are going to discuss Blake's poem "London" and we have agreed to meet tomorrow to talk about it and start planning our speaking parts! Grrrrrr somebody took "The Tyger" :o( That's my favourite poem!! Smelly person.
I can't believe that we only have a week before we have to do our first oral presentation! It's going to be very scary because I have absolutely no idea what he is expecting from us or how he wants us to analyse the poem! Hopefully Siri will have some idea, so I'll post again soon letting you know what she suggests.
Anyways, I'm off to bed now. I may have a day off of lectures tomorrow, but I still have to get up at a reasonable time to meet Siri and start work on the presentation.
Night all! xxxx
I began the week in a bad mood because on Monday I should have been in a class called "Histoire de la langue". However, due to the Sorbonne's silly planning and organisation, I couldn't find the room for my seminar! Either, they changed the room without broadcasting the news, or I wrote down the wrong room number for that particular class when choosing my modules. I searched for half an hour for the wrong room before considering double-checking the boards, and by that time it was too late for my 1 hour long class. Oh well, will try again next week!
Anyway, so far I'm really enjoying most of my lectures! :o) The course modules that I have chosen for this term are perfect for me, and it's not an obligation for me because I love learning about all the topics we are covering this term! That is one of the reasons I was so annoyed about missing the History class on Monday; I was expecting that to be really interesting! :o) I think my favourite class at the moment is the Tuesday morning "Civilisation de la Renaissance". It is practically non-stop story-telling for the entire lesson, which makes the bombardment of information easier to absorb. The lecturer clearly loves his subject and with him being a Shakespeare scholar, I feel a certain affiliation with the man. Unfortunately he seems keen to drop me in at the deep end with my French language lessons; at every available opportunity he bursts into a stream of very fast French which he expects me to decipher and respond to! Well, hopefully he'll forget about it in a few days or so.
Yesterday afternoon made my brain ache in the same way; my teacher is proud of the fact that she can translate her lessons from English into French and vice versa, so suddenly, mid-sentence she will switch languages and it confuses ALL of us, even the bi-linguists! This is especially tough on me when I have my very English days; sometimes I'm sure the French words jump right out of my head! It HAS made me realise, though, that it is necessary to maintain regular bilingual conversations in order to remember all you know of a language! I hope I'm able to keep up my French like this when I come back to England. If not, I might have to move out here! :op Something productive did come out of the afternoon's lesson though. . . I now have a presentation organised for the 20th November on the topic of "How women are represented in Chaucer" and more specifically for my specialisation, "How Chaucer's representation of women in The Wife of Bath's Tale (Canterbury Tales) differs from the typical descriptions of female characters in Old and Middle English texts". May sound boring to you lot, but that is an absolute DREAM of a topic for me! I'm doing a joint presentation with my friend Diana, so we'll be sharing the work-load a bit :o) I'm quite looking forward to tackling the subject, actually!
Today I had my first class for my Masters module, Shakespeare! Just before the seminar started, I started talking to a girl outside the room called Noémie who was also in the class. It was refreshing to have an entirely French conversation for half an hour, and then I was pleasantly surprised to see that the lecturer for the Masters class is none other than the Renaissance professor! It made the lesson extremely easy to bear, especially as it is (understandably) much more difficult to follow than my other classes. I am in a class with people who are at least 2 or 3 years older than me! Throughout the whole class, the tutor made constant references to different Shakespearean plays, many of which I have not yet read or studied. I felt pretty dumb during that class and I have vowed to read some more this weekend to try and catch up with the others, who all seem to know what they are talking about! That's one thing I've noticed about the Sorbonne; the students are much more hard-working, and committed to learning here! I don't know whether it is due to the Sorbonne being such a fantastic institution, or whether it is a French thing, but it is incredibly awing to see how devoted they are to their studies :o)
This afternoon brought took an irritating few hours of my life; they are gone and never coming back :o(
The English literature class was taken by the same very annoying lecturer from last week, who, as Siri pointed out, looks like the old tortoise from the Never-Ending-Story film, "Morla"! He has a faux English accent which only appears in some words, but most of the time you can tell that he is very French. He seems to have singled out Holly and myself because we are English and he has deigned to remember our names, but not many others, which is slightly embarassing! Last lesson, there were less than 10 students in the class (probably because not many knew that the lessons had already started), but this week the classroom was absolutely choc-a-block! For the second week running, Holly and I found ourselves separated by people, so Siri and I passed her notes along the table. Yet again he seemed to be stumped by the uncommon English words in our answers to his silly long-winded questions (which I think is ridiculous, what with him being a qualified English tutor and all!) so he glided over our comments and made silly remarks such as "Blake is not a cloud." I mean, come on mate! He is giving us waaaaaaaay too much material with which to mock him! Siri and I chose our presentation topic for this module too; we are going to discuss Blake's poem "London" and we have agreed to meet tomorrow to talk about it and start planning our speaking parts! Grrrrrr somebody took "The Tyger" :o( That's my favourite poem!! Smelly person.
I can't believe that we only have a week before we have to do our first oral presentation! It's going to be very scary because I have absolutely no idea what he is expecting from us or how he wants us to analyse the poem! Hopefully Siri will have some idea, so I'll post again soon letting you know what she suggests.
Anyways, I'm off to bed now. I may have a day off of lectures tomorrow, but I still have to get up at a reasonable time to meet Siri and start work on the presentation.
Night all! xxxx
P.S. I shall leave you with this lovely image:
Holly and I seem to have a bit of a thing about collecting random objects, and also, it seems, we have a slight addiction to Diet Coke. . .
No comments:
Post a Comment