Who's got the dunce cap?

You know, after almost two years of being immersed in French academic life, I still can't figure out their system of education. Any American student that has ever taken a class at a French university will probably agree with me when I say that it seems like the system here is made to set people up to fail. In a way, it's a genius Darwinian plan - it weeds out the idiots and the slackers and leaves room only for the elite few that deserve to progress in their quest to be part of the pretentious French intelligentsia. Ok, so maybe I'm being a little harsh. But when I get French translations back with a grade of 6/20 and am told that's fairly normal for this professor, I start to wonder: if the educator's job is to educate and facilitate the student's academic journey, why does he do everything he can to shoot the student down and make her feel like a complete and total moron? I really don't understand what the harm is in congratulating a student for a job well done or using a tone in class that doesn't seem like the professor thinks everyone is a mentally disabled chimp. He goes over translations, and 90% of the time, he goes off on why choice A is bad, and choice B is worse, and why choice C isn't even possible in French, but half the class put it down anyways. Rarely does he commend a student for an interesting proposition, and never has he commented positively on my or my friend's French. Alright, ego trip, I know. But seriously - I know we don't speak perfect French, but when everyone else we meet says we have a bon niveau de français, I expect to hear it as a little bit of encouragement from my professors, instead of a mini lecture after class about how this class is practically useless for us and how we need to work on our French. Also, he said he would grade us as if we were French people translating into English. And now I understand why French people suck so much with English.

It's the same with basically anything. Because of the system they've set up, where all you need is a 10/20 to pass, and the highest you can possibly get is an 18 - and even that would be like Stephen Hawking winning gold for the high jump - they've basically constructed a Petri dish of mediocrity. No one cares enough to do well, just well enough. Here, they say that the best student will get an 18, the professor would get 19, and only God would get a 20. And they grade things on such an arbitrary scale, too. How can you grade a translation on a conversion chart? One point off for a misconstrued idea, a half point off for being too inventive, another half point for using the wrong tense. They get mad at you for using calques (verbatim translations), but if you try to be a little more interpretive, they tell you you've strayed too far away from the original text. How can you get anywhere with that? Jesus, France. Loosen up a bit and let me have some ideas of my own!

And with that, I must return back to my weekend of translation. We're nearing the completion of the first draft of the Stoppard translation, finally. My job for the next few weeks pretty much consists of proofreading everything and making sure not too much got lost along the way. Did I mention this play is 91 pages long and includes page-long tirades involving 19th century pre-revolutionary Russian philosophy? Yeah, I know - you so wish you were me right now. I also have a presentation to do for Monday, one of those bitches of a translations for Tuesday, and a plan for my thesis for Wednesday, as well as some other various busy work. I went out last night with some friends, and tomorrow half my day is consumed with the translation meeting, so I don't think I'm going to make it to pub quiz, which is finally back this week. I've been looking forward to it for literally 6 weeks, which sucks.

Man, I'm so ready for the real world already.