Newsflash: Insurrection by American students at elite(ist) French institution fails

Ah, what a week! As you may have noticed I haven't been updating this thing very long. I'd say that has something to do with two things: 1) I'm a lazy bastard 2) I hate going back to school after vacation, and it's always hard to catch up again.

Regarding the second one, we only had class Wednesday through Friday, but I feel like I'm totally behind and incompetent in French. It's likely because of fatigue more than anything else, but I had a hell of a time following any of my lectures. Yes, I was falling asleep in some of them but others I just totally zoned out when I realized I couldn't follow sentences more than a few words long. Subordinate clauses and parenthetical statements were totally out!

On the upside, my econometrics professor (who speaks so softly and isn't very good at making me understand what she's teaching) thinks that I'm actually good at the stuff. Of course it was only because I'm not an idiot when it comes to computers and could tell other people what they did wrong as they used the statistical software. Like a dumbass though, I told her that I was just good with computers. Why burst her bubble?

Well, keeping expectations low for the final exams is always good. For most of my classes I have maybe one assignment for the entire semester, plus participation and the exam. I don't even care about grades anymore, just passing, but it's still slightly scary. One prof was handing back papers and when he got to the two American students, whose papers he'd stuck at the bottom, he said he couldn't grade our papers and asked us to come speak with him after class. And I always complained about OTHER students being bad representatives of the US!

It turned out that our essays were fine, but they didn't conform to the Sciences Po 'style' (which of course isn't described anywhere). We had both picked specific aspects of American society in order to answer the question 'Are we experiencing an increase in political passions?' I was all about political participation; the girl did something about women. Instead of writing an somewhat in-depth analysis of our respective subjects, we should have talked about 2-3 aspects and gotten all broad (and vague) on their asses. They call that going deeply into a subject (in 5-10 pages), although I'm skeptical. Then again, this might explain something about their teaching methods.

In any case, the professor was cool about it and offered to grade our essays based on the ideas and coherence of the arguments, but recommended that we add a few pages instead, so we'll have a better idea of what we're supposed to do in the future. With a mid-term next week and finals in a month or so, we could use the practice. But between a presentation a week for the next few weeks, plus articles, plus regular reading, plus just enjoying my time in Paris, I don't see how all of that is going to get done.

But I'll worry about it tomorrow. Now I'm off to a nice little bar in the 20th, right down the street from Mag's apartment. It's playing with fire, I know, but it's a great hole in the wall! Mag never used to go there, but I'll still be nervous all evening.