New year, new semester

Hello all. Well, I've been pretty terrible at updating this blog. Especially with anything other than pictures. Oops!

Today marks the first day of the new semester, but a little bit on the last semester first. . .

As you've seen, Aix got hit with some pretty intense snow a couple of weeks back. This made final exam week a little more interesting. I think two of my finals went ok (one was a survey class of linguistic sciences and the other was a cognitive psych class). . . Still waiting to hear about the results. The grading scale here is way different than what I'm used to. Everything is on a scale from 0 to 20, and scarcely nobody gets above 16. So when I heard about the 11 I got for my literature class first semester, I was bummed, but according to the credit transfer scale with IU, that corresponds to a B+. I can definitely deal with that. This makes it hard to judge whether or not I did well on my exams--if I'm just shooting for slightly above a 50%. Who knows if I succeeded in that or not. . .

And as for my last exam. . . I completely missed it. And in the world of education, missing a final exam is about as big of a snafu possible. This is how it transpired:
Professor announces exam date and time in class. Thursday, January 10th, 2009. Yes, it is true, this date did not exist for us this year.
I go to check the big schedule of all the final exams to confirm this date. It is not there. I go with what he said in class--January 10th.
January 7th rolls around. SNOW. Exams on the 10th are rescheduled for the 22nd.
January 21st rolls around. I go to the music office to confirm that my test is the next day.
Confirmation denied. Test was actually on the 15th. Shit.

I'm still waiting to hear back from the professor on what's going to be done about all of this. It's hard to get a hold of him because he is a professional musician, and this teaching business is just kind of on the side (the class was History of the Music of the Middle Ages). Most probably I will take an incomplete until June when the next round of exams are and just take it then with the next crop of students. If the department doesn't agree to that, I get a one-credit hour class F configured into my GPA. That would add character to my GPA, right? Grad schools will be impressed that I have that badge of character. Maybe I should start working on my cover letter now.

Classes today went well. First I went to a comparative literature course about the literature of central Europe in the 1970's. Should be interesting despite that everything I read in that class will be translated from another language. Only five students came to that class today. Maybe more will come next week, and maybe not. Out of these five students, only one of them is actually French. Other than her, there are two Austrian students, one student from Luxembourg, and me. The professor herself is Austrian, so she speaks nice and slowly. Hopefully, this class will transfer over to some 300 level comp lit class at IU, and I will be three-fifths done with a comp lit minor. That's right, I added another minor. Why the hell not? My second class of the day was a French lit class about farce and comedy in theater from the middle ages to the beginning of the 18th century. The professor is very animated, and despite the fact that he speaks very quickly, I don't have a problem understanding because he enunciates.

I find that I do not, in general, have problems with the majority of the French speakers here. I'm getting pretty damn fluent, if I do say so myself. The real problem is with guys with really low voices who mumble. But it's not like I would be able to understand them if they were speaking English.

Other classes on the table for this semester include a developmental psych class, an opera appreciation class, and a class about the psychology of music. All classes right up my alley.

Yesterday, my friend Laurie, who I met in my cognitive psych class, and Elizabeth and I went on a bit of a road trip. Pics to come soon. We went down to the region of the Camargues, started the day off with an epic walk and picnic, saw a few mountains of salt from the Mediterranean, and returned tired and happy.

That's the news for now. I hope what loyal readers I still have are all doing well.

French word of the day:
les flamants roses ( lay flam-on rose) = the flamingoes

Hier quand nous étions dans la région des Camargues, nous avons vu plusieurs colonies des flamants roses.