I would like to start off by apologizing for the length of this post….
This week was my much-anticipated first week of classes at La Sorbonne, and it feels like it went by so quickly.
Monday started off with me realizing how different travaux dirigés (TDs) can be from the recitations I’ve been trying to equate them with. My TD teacher for “The Architecture of Royal France” was over 50 and was certainly a professor in his own right. Our TD is going to focus on 18th Century Drawings, which other than the time period doesn’t seem to have much to do with the cours magistral. In addition, it appears as if the entirety of the work for this class is a 20-minute oral presentation. There might be a final exam, but since I don’t have to take it, it seems rather irrelevant. Where is all the work?!
Although when my TD classroom looks like this…. who cares?
My second course on Monday was the option for the architectural history course, which is all about the History of Gardens and also seems to be unrelated to the TD, although its definitely interesting. My final course of the day was my second week of Soil Mechanics at UPMC. While I’ve already taken soil mechanics, this course approaches the material in a different way and I’m learning a lot of vocabulary from it. It’s also a master’s level course here, which I find a little strange.
Malesherbes at 8 am
Tuesday started off on a rough note – my first class was an 8 am literature course at La Sorbonne’s Malesherbes campus, which is 45 minutes away by metro. It was still dark when I emerged from the metro at 8, and the literature course was two hours of relatively interesting but not especially enlightening material delivered by a not-too-engaging professor.
It was also a day of a lot of travel – I then headed off to Sorbonne-Clignancourt for a geography course called “Urban spaces and dynamics,” which was unfortunately pretty interesting. I say unfortunately because Clignancourt’s about as far away from where I live as you can get while only using the metro system, and I’d been hoping to not have to go twice a week. I then traveled even more for my first course at La Sorbonne’s historic campus, another literature course. This one was reputed to be with an excellent lecturer, Patrick Dandrey, but the course kind of surpassed me once he launched into a comedic analysis of a piece by Moliere that I haven’t read yet (although luckily I’d heard of it and knew the plot!)
Locations of my various universities
Wednesday was a lighter day, with only 2 courses at centers of La Sorbonne that are located within walking distance of each other. The first was a history course titled “The France of Louis XIV”. It started off with the professor launching straight into his lecture about “Louis XIV: Warrior King or King of War” and ended with him offering up an optional-seeming bibliography with no comments. Syllabus week definitely doesn’t exist here. Sometimes syllabus minute doesn’t even exist! I left a little confused, with no overview of the course, no idea of the work required, and a 2-page bibliography of history books so long it would take over a year to read them all.
The afternoon improved with my cours magistral for the architectural history course. It was very interesting, although I had the same problem as I’ve had in many of my other courses — they’re mostly third year courses, which means that its the students’ final semester of their degree, which means that most of the other students have a very high level of knowledge in this specialization. I, on the other hand, have almost no knowledge of the subject and therefore taking notes is extremely difficult. However, this class was better than most because at least I have a base in architectural history and so I was able to process the lecture instead of just madly trying and failing to write down everything the professor says while I try to catch up. After class, I approached another student to ask for note-taking advice and she offered to send me her lovely, typed-up notes. This also marked a turning point in my week of how upbeat and capable I felt.
My first attempts at note-taking.
Thursday almost started off the same way as Tuesday, but when I was still in bed at 7 am I had a conversation with myself and decided that it wasn’t realistic to expect myself to go to an 8 am class at Malesherbes twice a week. This was also a great way to eliminate a course from my list, something that I’m having trouble doing so far. So I slept in and just went to my TDs for Urban Spaces and Louis XIV.
These TDs were also quite different: Urban Spaces was much more similar to the recitation style I’m familiar with, although the material covered seems to be very separate from the material covered in the main lecture. Louis XIV finally explained the work for the class, and provided an outline — although it’s a TD outline, not a cours magistral outline. The second half of the TD was spent preparing a commentary outline in a group and then presenting them, which was surprisingly enjoyable, especially since I met two French students in the process.
The lovely Sorbonne Historique
Friday was long. Only two classes, but the first was a 3-hour literature TD and the second was my 4-hour Geotechnical Engineering course, so it really added up! The TD was fun and made me reconsider whether I wanted to drop the literature course. I have a computer account at UPMC now, so Geotechnical was a lot more enjoyable because I had my own computer to work on and didn’t have to share.
In retrospective, the worst thing about this week has been the callus and taut tendon I’m developing in my right hand. I’ve done about 20 hours of fast-paced writing this week, resulting in 33.5 pages of notes (record so far for one class: 7 pages for a 2-hour class), and my hand is definitely feeling it. How to take notes in these classes definitely confuses me. Some students take 10 pages of the most detailed notes possible in a Word document. Some only jot down vague outlines of notes in a Google doc. Some write absolutely every word that comes out of the professor’s mouth at lightning speed in narrow handwriting. Some neatly and thoughtfully print out a sentence every minute or so. Hopefully it’ll get better next week when I start taking some of my notes on a laptop!
Nouvelles Connaissances 