Debates in French

Dear Friends,

Once again Jane and I are delighted that the weekend has arrived.  We had another wonderful but intense and tiring week.  We will need to spend part of the weekend doing homework, organizing our notes and studying.  Since the weather should be nice this weekend, we are planning an excursion to Nice for the open air market and the Matisse and Chagall museums as well as some walking.

Thursday evening we went to a birthday celebration of one of the people in our section who was celebrating his 23rd birthday.  It was fun and interesting to go to the birthday party of someone who is 23 who is just a friend not a child or relative.  A lot of generational lines get blurred when everybody is going to school.  It is one of the things that we enjoy a lot about the school.

At the birthday party we were once again reminded what a remarkable group of people we are meeting.  We were talking with a Nigerian woman who has lived in the US for many years and is an MD in oncology (primarily research) who lives in Chicago.  Her husband a Pulmonary MD who did his residency at Mayo was visiting her.  She went back to the US last weekend to attend Michelle Obama's birthday party at the White House.  She worked with Michelle, and they live on the same street in Chicago.  What an experience that must have been.

All the exposes are now done, and our teacher has a new way of making us speak.  The class picked four topics to discuss.  We will discuss one topic a day.  Two students will introduce the topic with a presentation of no more than 10 minutes and will then ask each student a question.  The class will discuss each question.  The total discussion lasts 45 minutes.  The four topics that our class decided upon are (1) the pros and cons of the European Union, (2) the growing disparity of wealth in the world, (3) is there extraterrestrial life and (4) does the private life of public figures impact their competence (President Hollande is having difficulty right now with his private life here).

Today another student and I lead the discussion about the European Union.  I was surprised at how much we could actually discuss about the fiscal policies, trade regulations, etc.  In fact the discussion got quite heated over two issues.  We asked the woman from Russia if Russia should join the EU.  She was emphatic that it should not because it would not do anything for Russia.  The man from Sweden replied that the Russian economy was a disaster and needed a lot of help.  The Russian woman rose to the occasion and defended Russia very well.

The other topic that lead to a heated discussion involved the severe austerity measures imposed by the EU.  Jane and another woman were making the point that it was unfair to not let some countries stimulate their economies to reduce unemployment just because it might increase the debt of those countries.  A couple of the other people took the position that the rich countries were just sending all the money to the poor countries and that the poor countries were trying to claim that they were the victims.  It was clearly the case of the interests of the rich big countries with their rich big corporations benefiting from policies that hurt the workers.  I gave a passionate argument about the unfairness and unreasonableness of the austerity policies.  This discussion was just the warm up for Monday's discussion of wealth disparity.

Hopefully by Tuesday when Jane and another student present the issue of extraterrestrial life, everybody will have calmed down.  Jane will explain her theory that with over 170 billion galaxies in the observable universe, it is completely improbable that there is not life other places than on earth.  Stephen Hawking agrees with her theory.

We do not spend all day drilling on grammar and discussing weighty international issues.  Every day after lunch we have a practical lesson.  Today's lesson was nominally on crêpes.  By this time we all know that any lesson is really just to teach us more about grammar and structure in French.  Since each time a question is answered by a student it gives the teacher an opportunity to discuss some important point of grammar usually about a verb or pronoun or the placement thereof.

Anyway, the session on crêpes was great.  The teacher is very good and funny and at the end we got to eat crêpes.  Here you can see the teacher helping one of the students learn how to properly flip a crêpe.

More later,
Jane and the Unabashed Liberal