Exams!

So, to the mothers I was unable to speak to directly last week, I would first like to say Happy Mother's Day! I thought about doing a blog, but it would have been pretty boring. To be honest, I doubt this one will be much better, but I've added a fun story at the end to keep it from being too boring.

The reason for the lack of interesting information is, as you may have guessed from the title, that its exam time here in Rennes. I had my first two last week, so nearly all of the time between now and my previous post has been spent studying. The two last week were Constitutional Law of the 5th Republic and History and Civilization (the class for all of the international students). I would like to start by saying, I have a few qualms with the examination system here. Since I have had a tendency to criticize the French in this blog, I feel I should point out this is in fact specific mainly to Sciences Po, and in fact many other French students find the system disagreeable. Personally, I'm slightly more critical. For most of my classes, the exam is in the form of a one on one conversation with the professor. They give you a question, which is generally very vague, you have 15 minutes to prepare and then have to speak for 15 minutes. If you are unlucky enough to get a question about which you are not able to speak for that long, you are at the mercy of the professor. So, for Constitutional Law I did not do so hot on the exam. My topic was the "instauration d'un etat de droit" or instituting a state of law in France, which essentially means a system where the constitution is the highest authority above regular law. Beyond that, I was not really sure what else to say, and I was lost pretty quickly. I spoke for a couple minutes but he told me I was getting far from the subject and tried to redirect me. From then on, I was pretty much done. He asked me several questions which were either far too specific for me or that I knew and couldn't remember. While I have not had much text anxiety since my high school days, an oral exam in a foreign language seemed to bring quite a bit of that back and posed a significant problem in my ability to recall the information I had studied. To give you an idea of how bad it was: In order to help me out he asked me about Marbury v. Madison in the United States and I could not remember what it was about. To be honest, I'm a little uncertain about the outcome in that course. As for the exam grade, it will not be good. However, the paper is worth the other half of my grade and I think I did fairly well on that and it is possible that the average could be a 10 (if he's nice with my exam). I decided to take the strategy of talking about other subjects of the course that may not have been relevant when I had nothing else to say so if nothing else he'll understand that I had studied and learned something the past twelve weeks, but as for the grade it's just a guessing game at this point.

The next day was my exam with the woman I have taken to discussing so often in this blog over the past few months. That one went much better. It was a written exam with three short answer questions and one essay question and we had an hour and a half to do it. The short answer questions went pretty well and the essay question was not great, but it was basically impossible to answer in full in the time frame. The topic we were given was "Strengths and weaknesses of the Left in France from 1918-1981", the Left referring to the political left. For starters, this is the entire time period of the course, so describing the strengths and weaknesses in the detail she did for even one political party would be basically impossible. In addition, the French left in this period consisted of about political parties, and almost always the same issues of conflict between socialists and communists, and even within those two parties. I think I answered them all fairly well, but I'm not entirely sure this question is answerable within the given time period. Whatever the result, I'm extremely happy to be done with that woman forever.

As for the rest of my exams, I have three this week and I am officially finished on Thursday. I have one exam on Tuesday, one Thursday, and one that could be either Wednesday or Thursday. I know, it's weird that I don't know when it is, right? In fact, the only exam time I know for sure is the one on Tuesday because it is a written exam where everyone does it at the same time, but the others are posted on the board at school a few days before (not online, god forbid they should save paper or be able to inform us if the times change the day before). Following Thursday, it will be preparation to leave. I have to give two weeks notice to everyone and I'll be making some last minute trips to see some of the sights I have not yet had a chance to see. And now, it's time for the story I promised you.

About 3 weeks ago, some of the international students had a BBQ at a nearby park. We had a good time and headed home around 9 oclock (it was still quite light outside, in fact it stays light until around 10 usually). On our way home, we saw a kitten hiding under one of the cars. It was not exactly tiny but it was thin/small enough to look like it was not yet fully grown. We did not think too much of it at first because we see cats around town all the time. However, this one soon began following us. We thought it was a little weird but were certain it would stop at some point. Occasionally, it did stop, but then immediately ran ahead of us and stopped to look at us. At this point, we were very confused an unsure what to do because we had to cross a major road soon and did not want it to follow us and get hit by a car. However, when cars drove by it seemed sufficiently frightened that it wouldn't follow. This was not the case. In the end, this cat followed us all the way back to our dorm building (about 5 blocks and across a major road) and entered the building when we opened the door. He followed us to our rooms and we began trying to find a French person who would know what to do. He did not look like a stray (he had a collar mark on his neck but no collar) but we did not know who we were supposed to call about something like this. Eventually, someone else took him into their room for a while and we decided he was officially their problem. Not long after, we heard he had found his way down to the door and left the building. As it turns out, this was not true either. He did find his way to the stairs, but decided to wander over to the other building attached to ours. A week or so after, we heard he was still living in that building, taking little pieces of food here and there from whoever would offer it. So, Patton officially has a pet cat.

That's all for now folks. The next few days will be study mania and then I will be home free until I leave on the 30th. I hope all is well in the states and I will be seeing many of you in only a couple of weeks!

Best,

Tom