English course log

The Big day finally came, after a useless attempt on the 25 of March because of the national’s action day, we had to reschedule the poster session to the first of April.

We (Illya and me) finally could present our great poster about quantum teleportation wich was a really hard subject but still very interseting because of the possibilities it opens.

I could enjoyed the other poster, I started with one talking about Global warming and the vicious circle we are trapped in ! The second I saw was about metamaterials and I learnt that it was possible to make a cloak of invisibility thanks to the negative indice of metamaterials. Then I finished by the Scannig electronic microscope wich is a very interseting device wich allows you to have a 300 000X enlargement. It is a very effective technic because you can havr bith qualitative and quatitative anlysis. The only default is that the sample have to be conducting or metallized…

It was a very nice experience, I learnt a lot and really enjoyed the ambiance, maybe due to the buffet.

ps : I hope you enjoyed the guacamole:)

This lesson started with a long discussion about the movement of teacher/scientist. We first talked about the situation and then we watch a movie of Sorbonne’s president explainning the reasons of the strike, very instuctive but the quality of the sound was really poor … Then Illya who was on the “AG” came back and told us what have been decided there.

During the second part of the lesson we watched a very long and complicated talk. It was a “Ted Talk”, this one was about statistics. We mainly learned how statistics can lead you to huge mistakes. The show seemed really intersting and the speaker too but it was a too high level for us …

Today, each student had to read a paragraph form the article : “The price of free papers” (from Physics World) and imagine five questions about this article. Then we did a fastness contest. The teatcher asked the questions we wrote and we had to find the answers in the paragrahp as fast as possible.

This was a really hard exercise because first you have to find the related part of the article but the article himself  was a bit hard

I am sorry for being absent the 24th of February and third of March but I was in a trip, awonderfull one. During the february hollydays i have been to Tanzania. With my father, we decided to climb the highest free standing mountain in the world : Mount Kilimandjaro. So we flew to Tanzania with a group of 6 other french peoples.

The treck to mount Kilimandjaro was 6 days long … You may say it is very long just to climb a mountain but first the starting point is low (1500masl). And the main problem is that the top is 5895 meters high so there is few oxygen then you have to spend three days at approximately 4000 masl to get used to the altitude. And the last day you can finally go to the top.

After that we went to a safari in the natinal parks of Tanzania (Sernegeti and Ngorongoro). And it is beyond any imagination. The number and diversity of animals you can see in there is really incredible. Of course there is the big mamals (Elephants, rhinos, lions, hippopotamus, leopard, …) but there is amazing birds and reptiles.

But in these touristic parks I did not like the human contact, I think tourism has changed the life of the local tribe (the massaïs) because ten years ago they were living in total autonomy and now I felt they are “prostituting” themselves. I mean that children are begging for money, they charge you for seeing their village and the interior of their houses. And even the regular Tanzanians (not the massaïs) were not metling with us (we slept in “white only” hostels, not sharing the food, …).

So a wonderful travel in wild areas.

But do not worry I practiced my english with many locals and even learned a bit of Swaheli.

Ni ma quenda Tanzania na ma penda. (I have been in Tanzania and I liked it).

Today we were given a scientific article (mine was about quantum leap in chemistery, tough one !) that we had to sum up in order to explain it to another student. The point was that we could only use pictures or charts tu support our presentation.

It showed us the power of the images ! Indeed its way easier to understand when u got a clear visual support in front of your eyes than to try to imagine while your are listenning. One less thing to do for our little brains :p

After that, I listenned to Ewan who explained me his article (about fungus). The note taking was indeed easier with the charts ! Luckily because the final exercise was to sum it up.

So during this session we practiced again note taking and presentation and scientific vocabulary, wich, I guess are the main points of our english lessons.

Today we were in group of two or three students and we had to do a survey in the class.

Since we did not know each other very well, we chose a fun subject (according to me) : “alcohol consumption”, in order to make everybody comfortable (maybe it did not work out that well…).

So we chose five questions wich had to be answered by “yes or no” or a number so that we could make statistics. We asked the more people we could in order to have the best statistics.

Once the answers collected, we presented the results to the class. All these results were presented usint chatrs (bar, pie, …).

This was a good exercise because none of us really knew the vocabulary concernig the statistics, charts, and we had some hard time trying to get our public attention so we learnt a few tricks.

This tuesday, Elizabeth, like a magician took out one computer for each student and told us : “Today you will make a blog for your course log.” !

This is the last thing I expected to do during an english lesson. I found it was a very good idea since i have never had a blog and did not know how to make one. Elizabeth used this occasion to show us how “retarded” we were on the subject of internet 2.0, tags, RSS feed, …

Still it was a very intersting and refreshing lesson even if all the machines we used did not work very well.