Re: The English School System

En réponse à Chris Bates :

>Oh. :( I was looking forward to an interesting explanation and instead I
>get boring reality lol.
LOL. It's France. What d'you expect? ;)))

>  I can't remember where I read that about French
>and English courses being different now... in case you don't know, here
>Maths is compulsory to sixteen only, just like every other subject. If
>you decide not to go get a job at sixteen, you go to college (I know,
>its confusing when you talk to americans or some english people, but
>college more often means 16 - 18 education here than it does college in
>the sense of oxford or cambridge colleges). Some schools have a college
>attached which we call a sixth form.
It's confusing for French people too, because Junior High is called
"collège" in French. Senior High is called "lycée" (masculine word despite
the ending).

>I think something you did say highlighted a key difference between
>French and English teaching, I'm not sure which is better.
Me neither. I guess at the end people are about the same level and as used
up in both cases :((( .

>  There's a lot
>og splitting people up depending upon their ability (or their ability as
>much as any test can measure ability) in the core subjects like English,
>Maths, Science and Foreign Languages in secondary school (11 - 16). I'm
>not sure at all which approach is better at all... you get a GCSE at 16
>at the end of it if you pass however you were streamed, but what level
>you were classed as affects the maximum grade you can get. The
>disadvantage of course is that it imposes a limit on  the maximum grade
>people can get if they're not the most able at the subject, and you can
>get zero on a paper and fail when you might have taken an easier paper
>which would not have let you get above a C say but you could have at
>least passed. But on the other side if you stream people and they don't
>improve in the subject, then you can concentrate on the more important
>or managable things so at least they go away having learnt something
>rather than spending the whole year doodling in their exercise books.
I see. In France, the only splitting that happens is that students that
don't get enough as average have to do the year all over again. The whole
point is that *all* the different courses are considered important and the
student should be good at *all* of them. Stupid thought I know, but I'm not
responsible for the French educations system :((( .

>BTW, you don't know anything about north sea cod do you?
Not at all! ;)))

>  I think I
>mentioned before I'm in the first year of a maths degree, and my
>sadistic Modelling and Dynamics (Mechanics by another name lol) lecturer
>has set modelling cod populations as the group project for my group.
>*sigh* I've come up with a model but there's something wrong because I
>just have a feeling looking at the data that the poor cod would be
>driven to extinction if my fishing quotas were used (we were supposed to
>come up with patterns and amount of fishing to stop the cod going
>extinct). But never mind.. there are other fish in the sea....
LOL. Never had such kinds of projects to do ;))) . But it's true that we
never used a computer at school (in Primary School yes, but this was an
experiment, one of the first schools in France to have a few computers to
teach basic things to children. And the computers were a network of Thomson
MO-5 connected to a 1512 ;))) ), so we couldn't have done such a thing
anyway. You have to think that even today, most scientific exams forbid the
use of calculators :) .

Christophe Grandsire.

http://rainbow.conlang.free.fr

You need a straight mind to invent a twisted conlang.