Learning in France

Sophomore year at OU, I was assigned a 20 minute exposé for my French class about French music. I chose, more specifically, to talk about French rap. I played some MC Solaar and got in a bit of a sticky situation explaining NTM's "Pose ton gun". I thought this was an exercise in speaking for a prolonged period of time, since we were all there to learn a foreign language. Little did I know that it was, in fact, just the way French classes are taught.

Each class assigns exposé topics. Without fail. And then the student is responsible for gathering information and presenting it to the class. Your teacher might interrupt numerous times to correct your grammar, or your facts, or tell you he/she just didn't like the order in which you made your points -- or your opinion on a certain subject. In fact, opinions are discouraged, though I think this stance would probably have a lot more weight if it was ever the professor who was responsible for conveying information.

We spend a lot of time discussing, but also seem to be corrected a lot if we have our own ideas. Literary analysis, for example, is supposed to be mostly based off of the critiques of experts we're supposed to find in the library (but never on the internet, because there's nothing credible on the internet). I spent a while cultivating the idea that higher education was for teaching one how to think, but here it seems to be about teaching people to gather information using a card catalog and some poetry anthologies. But most of the card catalog is online now, so that's a plus.

The amount of assigned group work here would delight my middle school teachers, who spent most of their time trying to get us to work together. The discouragement of individual ideas would horrify many of my high school teachers, who spent the greater part of their time trying desperately to get us to have an original thought. But very little of what we do bears any resemblance to what college is like for me at OU.

The differences are numerous, even discounting the comfort of the classrooms, choice of coursework, accountability of teachers (office hours? being on time? notifying someone when you're cancelling class? objective grading? timely return of graded papers and exams?), technology on campus, the assignment of homework or reading, even the use of textbooks. I never realized how much of a visual learner I was until I was struggling to understand a lecture in my second language that was given entirely without visual aid. There are no powerpoint presentations, there is no textbook to follow along with, there are no photocopied hand-outs and rarely is there even something written on the chalk board. This is particularly difficult as a learner of a language where most of the words have silent letters or complicated combinations of vowels, even without taking into account proper nouns that break rules. Notable exceptions to the no-visual-aids rule were the history of art (the lectures on churches would always have at least some photo of a basilica on the projector -- whether or not it was the basilica we were talking about was seemingly random) and phonetics (in which there would always be at least some phonetic or phonological symbols).

My fear of speaking in front of large groups of francophones is exacerbated by there not being any kind of policy regarding criticism or the privacy of grades. Grades are announced in front of the class or posted by name on a bulletin board somewhere, and post-exam or post-exposé critique is always conducted immediately and in front of the class. Having heard the criticism of language from others who at least speak French as their first language, I can tell you I'm not looking forward to giving an exposé next week. I've so far been able to avoid it on this side of the Atlantic, but I think that time is past.

I miss our educational system more every day. It's expensive, and that sucks. But I'm beginning to understand what it is we pay for.