Although anyone on an Erasmus year will go to all lengths – whether it be an immaculate Instagram or a chirrupy year abroad blog – to posit the year as a highlight, I can guarantee you that they don’t share even half of the struggles, and often tears, which go into it.
Erasmus isn’t all play
The bureaucracy of sorting out inscription and learning agreements may have now been resolved, but I have at least two pieces of assessed work each week until Christmas, which started in only my second week of lectures at university here.
Despite having been told by other exchange students that French universities don’t really do coursework and tend to prefer exams as a way of assessing students, I’ve found that to be almost the opposite. Coursework exists alright, just not as I know it from the UK. Whereas at UoB a piece of coursework for my programme would consist of an essay written and researched in your spare time at home or in the library, coursework here takes the shape of presentations and continuous assessment.
My comparative literature class makes us write a piece of assessed work in the last 40 mins of the class each lesson, which can be very unnerving. However, the teacher goes to great lengths to try to make us feel comfortable writing it and that we know what we’re doing, as it’s a class of all international students. We go through a plan for the essay title in class together all contributing ideas, then write an excerpt of it as our piece of work. This has ranged from one of the main plan points, an introduction, a conclusion, or – if we brainstormed as a class rather than writing a formal plan – writing this plan up properly in the classic French three-times-three part structure.
Speak now, or forever hold your peace
There is a very strong emphasis on presentations in order to make up the ‘oral participation’ grade, and for almost every module I have to give a presentation to the class. My first one was for the comparative literature class which I did with Jessica and Jennifer: giving an introduction to the text we were studying that week and an overview of the analysis of the question of the week. We’d been told that because it was a group of three, our presentation absolutely had to be 15 mins long to give each of us a proper chance to speak. However, other groups seemed to have been better received for having shorter, less in-depth presentations accompanied therefore by less use of a script.
The second presentation was a composed commentary on an extract from whichever Ancient Greek tragedy we were studying that week. Each week the whole class had to prepare one of these at home, and then by random selection two or three people would be chosen to present in class. We also spent an hour in every other class writing one on the spot, where the same thing would happen again. I thus asked the tutor specifically for another at-home assignment I could prepare, due to being Erasmus and not comfortable enough with French to write one on the spot.
Having created this assignment specifically at my request for the class, he selected three other people to present it the next week, which I found terribly annoying and stressful. I spoke to him again at the end, where he did the same thing (for a different section of the text), but this time didn’t tell the rest of the class to prepare it as well. The next week I was finally allowed to present and, unlike the French students whose arguments he’d been attacking, the only thing he picked up on was my pronunciation and disgusting Anglo-Saxon vowel sounds. Apparently listening to opera and the elongated vowels in it is the solution.
The third presentation I did was for my European Society class, where we were pretty much free to pick any topic as long as it was related to the theme of the week – gender and minorities. Sarah and I presented on Laura Bates’ Everyday Sexism Project , sexual harassment in the UK, and the London tube campaign #reportittostopit.
We managed to open up the discussion afterwards and get people talking about their experiences of street harassment, as well as what steps we as individuals and as a society can take against it.
Mini tests
The last form of assessment I’ve experienced so far is the mini 20 minute test for my German class. These happen every three weeks, and our teacher is kind enough to tell us which vocabulary blocks, grammar points, and themes to revise for it. Instead of writing this post, I should really be preparing for this.
A plus,
Zoe x
An Aixpat-en-Provence 