Ma Vie in France

This month in France took place a rite of passage: the high school baccalauréat. Often translated as ‘high school diploma’, the baccalauréat is the mandatory, nationalized high school exit exam students must take in order to continue with their studies. While nowadays having one’s bac is becoming more and more common (much like having a high school diploma in the United States), for some students it is the first of many exams they will take in their adult lives, in both educational and work contexts. Because not only is right now the end of the baccalauréat, it is also the middle of the ‘concours’ season for many other areas of study. Concours, a word impossible to translate in English, is more or less a competitive exam. Competitive because the results of a concours do not depend on how good you score, but how much better you score than everyone else taking the exam. I’ve had an inside look into two concours going on at the moment, the agrégation in English (an exam to ha...

After the all the time I’ve spent in France, teaching French and studying French, I’ve become used to many things that surprised me in my earlier stages of study. Every once in a while, though, I’ll learn a piece of information about France that is totally new and catches me off guard. This week, I had one of these moments. In talking to university students, we were on  the subject of grandes écoles (already a strange concept to non-French citizens). I was asking students to name the different, most well-known grandes écoles. These are our equivalent to Ivy League schools. They listed the names quickly and briefly, using acronyms and single words because the names are so common and obvious to them. There is one school out of this group that really sticks out: Polytechnique, also just called X (which I also learned this week, hence the clever title of this post). Not only is it, from what I understand, the institution for higher education relating to the sciences, but...