FRNC1631/1632 crap course? (1 Viewer)

[bennychanman]

mmk i don't know if anyone who does this course is actually reading this but i will have my vent anyway.

yeees....i chose continuing to do french at usyd after 6 years in high school and all i can say is that i'm pretty disappointed withe the Jnr French 5/6 courses...

the good points:
i) the grammar lecture on monday...last semester it was boring as ever but this semester it's better.

the bad points:
i) TOO MUCH WEIGHTING OF CONTACT HOURS ON LITERATURE! Is anyone really sick of this half of the course? how can they spend (or waste) 50% of our contact hours on bloody french philosophy. The subject has become more of a history/philosophy course, just done in french....that lecturer we've got now is crap as well....

ii) mismatch of standards? i don't understand how in one half of the course, we're getting taught pronouns and all the (simple) grammar...but in the other half of the course, we're suddenly expected to be able to write a 1500 word essay on existentialism (in french!)...

severely disappointed. thought i'd be able to get BETTER at french, but am gaining nothing and only losing what i spent 6 years learning.

 

[bustinjustin]

I felt the same about FRNC1621, the intermediate stream. We were learning basic negation in lectures but had to debate about topics from art to economics in class. All the streams are taught really badly apparently, so it was really liberating to be able to drop it altogether this semester.

But yeah, I miss/ed high school french...

 

[nemuca]

well, apparently most people i know doing FRNC1631/FRNC1632 found it crap (if not crap, it's not quite what they expected), and i think i'd be dropping it next year...

personally, i have no probs with writing 1500-word essays on absurdity, but i just don't understand why the hell we're still doing those grammar stuff when we should all have learnt it in high school.

the other thing that puzzles me, is that why on earth do we do more difficult stuff in reading but it only takes up 40% of the course? you work hard to keep up with all the tute preps, do all the research for essays, and in the end it only counts for a tiny percentage of the whole course. what logic is this?

i have a feeling that tutorials have improved this semester (it's probably just because i got new tutors), but lectures have gone worse (i mean the Tuesday one, coz i can't go to the Monday one due to a timetable clash -- though Peter Cowley shouldn't have changed much anyway)

 

[bennychanman]

yeah monday lectures are the same...with good ol' peter cowley...


who's your tutor? You don't happen to have roland geldreich do you? (the scary one!)..

hmmm, you're right for the whole low counting-percentage thing re: the textes et societe.
makes working so hard for that part of the course just so absurd, doesn't it?
(sorry just had to make that lame pun)

 

[littlewing]

i feel the same... after 6 yrs of french at high school and all yr12 spent slaving away on extension, i was expecting french at uni to be awesome... not so much. i did 1631 or whatever the advanced junior french was last semester, but have since dropped this semester's course... i just couldn't stand grammar repetition and the ridiculous textes et societe part of the course that was so much more work than the grammar, but counted for less! i don't mind writing about absurdism etc but we were given little to no guidance. PLUS i had roland as my language tutor and he was incredibly scary. so as much as i love french, and want to continue to speak/learn it, it doesn't seem like uni is the best place to do this. but for those of you still soldiering on, bon courage!!!

 

[bennychanman]

hehehe, i share your thoughts exactly...

im' thinking of quitting though, except when we move onto the senior language units, there'll be no more lit i think so i just have to hang in for 1 more semester..

just for your interest, we're STILL doing Camus texts, this semester we did "L'etranger"...had our "test" on it yesterday! Thankfully we only do TWO texts this semester...! Did you have Andrea as your tutor?

ROLAND ROCKS! Despite the initial scaryness, ...he's SO french it's funny...the way he just walks around in his funny hobo clothes n socks & sandals and the way he goes "OUUUUUUUAIS.."......gold. hahaa.

Grammar lectures have become SLIGHTLY more interesting, bit more difficult if anything...but anywho...

 

[encoreunefois]

Do I feel like an idiot - I saw this post 3 years too late.

For anyone thinking of studying French in 2010:

DO NOT STUDY FRENCH AT THE UNIVERSITY OF SYDNEY

That's for anyone who does see this post before they make the mistake I did.

That last post :

The memory of those socks and sandals has stayed with me too. :jaw:

In my opinion, since he only wore them in the first tutorial, he's probably just doing it to say "I know you'll think I'm rude and daggy and won't like me, so you might as well know right now - this is how it's going to be in my class and I don't care what you think, since I think you're all idiots yourselves".

I don't think Roland Geldreich is scary but he is incredibly jaded. Then again, I'd be jaded if I'd been teaching people like Bimbo Chanel for WAY too long.

The REALLY scary one is Francoise Grauby. She's one of those women who is nice until you disagree with her, then she treats you first like you have swine flu and then like she really thinks you're probably retarded (since that's the only logical explanation for why you wouldn't adore her course). Patronising and a total feminazi. She sees everything in life as one, big gender issue.

She acts like she believes that since most people won't tell her what they really think of her course, there's nothing wrong with it.

Maybe they just don't want a few marks disappearing from their final scores!

 

[sandersen]

who's your tutor? You don't happen to have roland geldreich do you? (the scary one!)..

haha he made one girl in our class cry on the 2nd tute i think and then kept on referring to it until the end of semester! I liked him though, youhave to see through it a bit i guess

im' thinking of quitting though, except when we move onto the senior language units, there'll be no more lit i think so i just have to hang in for 1 more semester..

Well no there isn't literature but it doesn't mean it gets any better... I actually can't remember what we did last semester, but it was about 25 of us in one of the rooms in the meta centre every week for 3-5pm on thursday afternoons. Death. We had to write essays and do a journal télévisé which we got mixed amounts of support for. Tutor's comment for our newsreader: she read too much. 15 minute presentation - I mean hell, real newsreaders get a fucking autocue!!!

The REALLY scary one is Francoise Grauby

Agreed, she is insane.

I also think it's so sad that we are losing our speaking ability. We get the opportunity to prepare some written work, but class sizes are so big that it is impossible to really get any time with the tutor to improve. And still, there is such a big difference in abilities in our stream. In 3621 you get some people who sound like native speakers but can't spell/grammar at all...
We hardly get any feedback - last semester we had a grammar test - we never got our marks back, then the semester after they went through it in about 5 mins in a lecture but by then who could even remember what they had written.