As an American teenager reaches the end of his or her senior year in high school, senioritis tends to set in. Students get their college acceptances in March or April, and then head down the long, fun stretch of proms, class trips, parties, with only a few hour-long exams that hardly matter, before a last long summer of freedom. It is usually a happy time in their lives.
In France, on the other hand, this time of year is fraught with anxiety for students in their last year of lycée, called Terminale. They must spend long hours for many months preparing for the Baccalaureate, or bac, exams that will determine their whole future. They don't find out how they did until the end of the summer, when their results, with their name and grade, are publicly posted outside their schools. Then they have only a few weeks to scramble for a place in the next stage of their education. Students and parents have to be very well organized to make this happen correctly. The French system is merciless to those who don't know the rules.
Traditionally, the first exam is the bac philo, or philosophy exam. Although students specialize in various areas and there are several different bacs, with varying prestige, everyone in Terminale is required to take the bac philo. This means that Thursday, the first day of the bac, 642,235 seventeen- and eighteen-year-olds all across France sat down and for four hours answered questions about the meaning of life. On the Bac S they included: "Does art need rules?" and "Is it up to us to be happy?"
This is hilarious!!! But it also explains why most of the French people I met are slightly more intellectual than their American counterparts.
Posted by: Lexy | 01 August 2010 at 02:10