Coders sought for island hacking

Coders sought for island hacking

The Journey Home

Ye. Gods.
I'm on the 21:00 East Midlands train out of St Pancras. I should have been on the 20:15 but the preceding Eurostar was held up for 45 minutes by an electrical storm in France and we hadn't even arrived at St Pancras by 20:15, let alone got through customs. I've got a Eurostar business card so I know who to badger for whatever I'm due from them, but East Midlands Trains have very kindly waived the requirement for me to buy a new ticket for the journey, saving me £80 or so. Props to East Midlands Trains - I'll use them again. And the station is directly in front of a power station; it reminds me of the Fairy Godmother's house/factory in Shrek 2. Next time I'm going for the photo op.
Being 45 minutes late out of London is the least of the problems with this journey, however. It began on the Caen-Paris St Lazare train, when the heating came on in my carriage on the most humid if not actually the hottest day of my week in France. I thought I was going to suffocate - I went into the vestibule and lolled on the floor till the guard came and asked if I had a ticket, presumably in the belief that I was on something. When I got to Paris it was just as bad: there were very few signs for the Magenta metro station at St Lazare and when I finally made it to Gare du Nord all the lifts were broken and I had to carry my case up 7,000 flights of stairs.* I actually collapsed at the top of (what at the time I believed to be) the penultimate flight, something I haven't done for a long time. A truly horrible experience.

Which is all a great shame, as this morning was great :) We should have started the week with something like this morning's activities, had a good laugh and got our confidence up. The theme was Cultures, so we read and wrote poems and short stories and then acted out extracts from nonsense plays, which was awesome. We ended the session with an upstanding rendition of the Marseillaise and agreed for the purpose of international diplomacy to overlook the 'combat impure blood' bits. Fantastic :)

* My vision had blurred by this point, so my calculations may be a little out.

Group presentation was AWESOME

I am still typing on an AZERTY keyboard; please forgive any errant keystrokes. This afternoon each group presented its project to each other group in turn, and for ours ('Les Jardins Partout Pour Tous') I was presenting the objectives and benefits of creating community gardens and allotments on currently waste ground. I really enjoyed it - I'd love to do another one tomorrow. I have come to the conclusion that giving a very short presentation should be scheduled at the start of the week, to increase students' confidence in speaking. I now feel myself much more sufficient to hold a conversation in French (and have indeed since done so) than I did this morning. Giving a presentation repeatedly on something I understand has increased my confidence and fluency - by the time the second group arrived I was improvising without my notes, and after the second or third repetition I even spontaneously varied the tense (even to the conditional and the use of 'si'!) and mode (use of the subjunctive!) of what I was saying. That is how to gain practice in hearing one's own voice pronouncing sentences.

All week they've tried to teach us how to hold a spontaneous conversation mostly by throwing us into such conversations, with fast-speaking French people, with little or no preparation. This is not realistic for people whose conversation practice in the preceding twelve months is practically nil. My knowledge and understanding of French was good when I arrived and may now be very slightly better; but I could have improved so much this week if there had been a strong element of non-spontaneous speaking early on. I don't have to create French statements or think up responses to questions on a daily or even a monthly basis in my ordinary life, so how am I to be expected to respond to suddenly being required to do so for days at a time? However I might have been expected to react, what happened was that I became painfully shy and have only really expressed myself fluently in French when irritated. I do not wish for the solution to my shyness to be constantly becoming aggravated.

So that is my conclusion at the end of an expensive and debilitating week in Caen: starting with structured presentations may bore the people who live in France/are French,* but they are not the ones who need the most help and the week needs to focus more on noticeably improving students' speaking ability by beginning with something to give them confidence. I may email an edited version of this post to the course organisers when I get home.

* I understand that there is at least one French person here this week and I can only say that I am extremely grateful not to be in his/her tutor group.

P.S. I have been given my dates for the speaking exams, and they could hardly be more convenient had I picked them myself: Spanish 6-9pm on Monday 24th September (a weekend to revise!) and French 6-9pm on Thursday 4th October. Win. With luck and a following wind I may pass this year creditably, and go on to visit my young man in Holland afterwards with a clear head. :)

Toujours à Caen

J'ai reçu 85% pour mon projet le plus récent, et je suis contente. La note du dernière projet était trop bas pour réfléchir le travail il a contenu. Je suis toujours à Caen, juste. Aujourd'hui j'ai rencontré avec la conseillère pédagogique pour renoncer du cours, à cause de mon incapacité à dire quelques simples sentences en français. Je me sens comme idiote - aujourd'hui je ne peux pas comprendre aucune chose, même en anglais, et si on veut une réponse on devra attendre jusqu'au enfer congèle plus. Mais je lutte à continuer, parce que ça m'énervera vraiment si j'ai fait toutes les choses jusqu'à ce moment, complété tous les projets, et assisté aux tous les séminaires (même l'un auquel j'étais toute seule avec la professeure), seulement à faire défaut au dernier obstacle. Mais je ne veux pas me faire mourir avec trop de travaux (ça a un son très familier). La directrice du cours a dit que je ne dois qu'assister à la classe le matin, et éviter les activités l'après-midi qui ne sont pas obligatoires. En cette manière je peux réussir et répondre aux exigences sans me tuer. Maintenant j'ai une des activités qui ne sont pas obligatoires que je vais essayer à faire parce que c'est du subjonctif, et comme tel c'est très utile pour quelqu'un dont la langue n'a pas le subjonctif. A bientôt.

Caen: Day: Minus One

Yesterday was SUCH a long day of travelling. Since it had to be a single-day journey I made the right decision to do it the day before registration rather than registration day itself - even leaving East Midlands Parkway at 8:32am I still didn't get to la Gare de Caen until 5:10pm, and from there it's another 15-minute tram/bus/taxi ride to the campus, plus a further 10 minutes spent hunting for reception. Registration today is at 2pm. Not doable. Good decision, pat on the back.

I would like publicly to thank my mother for picking me up before 7 o'clock yesterday morning to go to the station, and for organising and ferrying my cats to go on their holiday while I'm away. East Midlands Parkway station was a surprise: it is a pleasant and modern station, which sits directly below a power station with an assortment of giant cooling towers. The whole place smells of steam. Yes, unexpected. Photo opportunity.

The journey was uneventful in the main. I met up with a fellow student and we helped each other across Paris between Gare du Nord and St Lazare. If I make a similar journey in the future I'll allow more time for changes, especially when one change is for Eurostar. Must think of it as a land aeroplane, with corresponding passport check/customs timescales. Armed police everywhere at both ends, the French ones in army getup. Unnerving. I was glad to get on and away.

By the way, Eurostar is UNCOMFORTABLE. The seats are fixed in a semi-recline position and are designed for people at least 4"taller than I am - the curvature of the seat bore no resemblance to the shape of my spine in any position of which my body is capable (I tried quite a few in an effort to get comfortable); in the end I went to sit in the vestibule on one of the folding seats because that was more comfortable than my £100 booked passenger seat. Complaints aside, it really was more comfortable, not only in posture terms but also in climatic terms - I felt miles better for having spent the last half-hour before Paris Nord in a cool, empty, breezy area on a comfortable and supportive seat with more leg room, light and view. I recommend it for the entire duration of the journey.

Now I am using McDonald's wifi but my tram goes soon so I'll tell you about today another time :)

Be like a panda

Still not quite right, and Spiderman

Yesterday I went to the cinema, ostensibly to see The Amazing Spiderman but mostly to test my ability to cope with an outing on my own. I work a short walk away from the cinema so it was a reasonable comparison. I managed to get home, although by the time I'd walked from the bus stop to the top of Corporation Street I was lurching like something out of one of my young man's horror films.

To explain, I had to go home from work ill last Friday lunchtime and I have spent more time than I'd like in bed in the intervening week. I've got a little done towards my now twice-extended French assignment but my brain just won't process information efficiently enough - I'm really really slow, mentally. It's quite worrying, even frightening, to have such difficulty comprehending what are not impossible tasks. One wonders whether one might not after all be capable of working full time.

At the moment I am considering that it might be depression as I am easily made to cry at the moment; perhaps the trouble with focusing on the French is motivational. I don't know. I went to see the lady doctor at the surgery the other day to get a sick note and two other things she didn't provide but I didn't mention the depression-like aspect - she is not someone to whom one can talk openly, which does not recommend her as a General Practitioner. Well well, something will work itself out.

On the whole it's a good thing I wasn't fixing all my hopes on the quality of the film, as I found it quite unpalatable. I don't expect reasoned arguments for world peace from a superhero film - indeed my main reason for going to such films is that I won't have to think too hard - but I do expect the promotion of responsible behaviour, especially when the dialogue is full of advice in that direction. I did not appreciate a scene where the hero enters a girl's bedroom through the window and proceeds to come onto her while she's patching him up; my objection is not to that itself, but to the part where she says 'No, no, no' and he says 'Yes, yes!' and keeps trying to kiss her. What is this saying to teenage boys about what to do when a girl says No? Especially as she does not ultimately kick him in the unmentionables but reluctantly gives in to his winning smile. And, if this is not too much of a spoiler, he routinely forgets his small promises and then in the end deliberately breaks a really important one. Very disappointing superhero role-model behaviour.