English Over The Sleeve

Back. In time for classes. Prep not really sufficient, but will have to do…

To cross the Sleeve, Macdo recommends Norfolkline Dover - Dunkirk. Brand new ferries, nice crew, and very very empty (no coaches allowed, so although the ship was groaning at the seams with the trucks, the lounges were all pretty much empty. Sweet.)

Y’all take care, d’ya hear?

More later.

I’m off for the weekend - to Holland, first, for a quick lesson observation, then the UK to be interviewed for a PGCE course.

Round trip: just shy of 1500 km… and I’m driving. I must be crazy!

The end of the tournament has brought no real surprises - France has won on point difference, followed by Ireland, Scotland, England, Wales and Italy.

Over the tournament, there have been some surprises - England’s mishap against France, obviously, but also Wales-Italy, where Italy won their first away point in their 6 nations career. Scotland has also had a very good run over the season, beating both England and France at Murrayfield, and not allowing the Irish to run away with the score at Lansdowne Road.

I must say that I’m quite worried about England - the RWC in France is in 2007!

The third (and, let me reassure you, final) CAPES exam is about translation. That’s what it’s called: épreuve de traduction (version et thème).

The first part of the exam is the thème. ( French to English, in this case)

Un jour, sans que je m’y attende, sans que j’y prenne garde, un visage féminin s’imposa à moi avec une aveuglante évidence. Dans cet enfer parisien, il devait bien y avoir un être qui sache me sourire. Ce fut lors d’un récital du violoncelliste Pierre Fournier.

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This link has nothing to do with the Nuclear Industry Association in Britain, the National Institute on Aging in th US, or the National Institute of accountants for Australia. I’m sorry if you were looking for any (or all) of those.

The CAPES subject will be up shortly, I promise.

It’s a series of 3…

This morning’s paper:

En vous appuyant sur votre connaissance des Journals de Lewis et Clark, analysez et discutez la citation suivante :

“What Lewis and Clark were doing on either side of the trans-Mississippi West represents something fundamental about exploration in the time between 1760 and 1815. That half-century witnessed a dramatic expansion of scientific and geographic knowledge about the West beyond the Great Lakes. Explorers were the vanguard for an expanding intellectual frontier. But the period saw more than a growing empire of the mind. North of Lake Superior and south and west of Saint Louis, the continent became the arena for a clash of national empires. Spaniards, English, Canadians, Russians and Native Americans all vied for western dominion.”

James P. RONDA, “Dreams and Discoveries: Exploring the American West, 1770-1815″,
The William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd ser., 46.1 (1989): 145.

in Sujet CAPES 2006, composition en français

The Capes is the French not-quite-equivalent-to-the-PGCE competitive exam. I’m currently sitting it.

3 five hour exams on litterature, civilisation and translation…

This morning:

Write a critical commentary of the following passage, explaining through what means (both stylistic and theatrical) Shakespeare stages the shift in power relations.

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I mentioned Mechanical Turk in a previous post, and I’ve been marking piles of papers at times when I’d much rather be preparing exams - my exams, that is…

Now the two ideas have fusionned. Anybody interested in correcting, say, a hundred papers at € 0.01 a go?

Answers in the comments.

Some of my guys had to write a short summary of a book excerpt. I’ll give you a quote of one summary - can you guess what book?

Wedding was ready, but no bridegroom ago. The man wich go married wrote a letter to his future fiancée. (I reject all spelling liabilities…)

In another class, I was told in a multiple-choice that Sherlock Holmes was created by Lewis Carroll - several times!

France’s biggest win in this fixture since 1986.

Says it all, really…