Christophe Gillissen vous invite à une réunion Zoom planifiée.
Sujet: agrégation Irlande du Nord (4)
Heure: 27 mars 2024 15:00 Paris
Rejoindre Zoom Réunion
https://syvik-fr.zoom.us/j/95419332313?pwd=M0cyckFkMjN1Q0E0MHVUUHkrMW0wZz09
ID de réunion: 954 1933 2313
Code secret: 680918
John Mullen, Université de Rouen - Teaching blog
Links and comments for university students of English, and of British Studies and British history. Study links connected with my classes, and general links on current affairs etc. There are sometimes indications as to what group might be particularly interested (L2 for Licence 2nd year, for example)
...
Tuesday, March 26, 2024
Cours Irlande du Nord demain
Thursday, March 21, 2024
Podcast and slides Andrew Carnegie/ podcast and slides Theodore Roosevelt
Here is the recording of the introductory lecture on Andrew Carnegie
Here is the part of the class examining an extract from the document
And here are the slides we saw in class
Here is the recording of the introductory lecture on theodore Roosevelt
Here is the part of the class examining an extract from the document
And here are the slides we saw in class
Wednesday, March 20, 2024
Agrégation interne compréhension orale/thème oral . Signing in code!
I was able to sign in for myself, but have not been able to so far for you. You have not very much time to sign in on the Sofia platform with the code for Wednesday morning 20 March, which is 7833 .
Saturday, March 16, 2024
Cours Irlande du Nord mercredi 20
Christophe Gillissen vous invite à une réunion Zoom planifiée.
Sujet: agrégation (3) Heure: 20 mars 2024 15:00 Paris Rejoindre Zoom Réunion https://syvik-fr.zoom.us/j/94046708081?pwd=dWZhRmE1NG1RQzNZNVhOSUtJZC9Ydz09 ID de réunion: 940 4670 8081 Code secret: 002335
Tuesday, March 12, 2024
Agregation Irlande du Nord, cours mercredi
Voici le lien pour le cours mercredi prochain :
Christophe Gillissen vous invite à une réunion Zoom planifiée.
Sujet: agrégation (2)
Heure: 13 mars 2024 15:00 Paris
Rejoindre Zoom Réunion : https://syvik-fr.zoom.us/j/98417091384?pwd=NGpUV0FrbUlySjJpYklhWUlBVmYrdz09
ID de réunion: 984 1709 1384
Code secret: 945279
Monday, March 11, 2024
Emmeline Pankhurst podcast and slides
You will find here the class on Emmeline Pankhurst, her ideas and her activism:
You will find here an analysis of a section of her speech:
And you will find here the slides we saw in class:
Wednesday, February 28, 2024
Thème agrégation
I wasn’t paying attention and I just realized today was my last class teaching thème for agrègation! Good luck to the externe people in the exams, if I don’t see you again. If you are still here next year, I will not be, as I am retiring.
I will see the interne people a few more times for comprehension orale/ thème oral (externe people, you are welcome to come if you are free and you find it useful.
Monday, February 26, 2024
Frderick Douglas - Letter to my former master. Podcast
You will find here a recording of the class on the context of Douglas's "Letter to my former master".
You will find here a recording of an analysis of one part of the document
You will find here the slides I used in class
Wednesday people: we will be looking, Wednesday 28 Feb, at the speech by Emmeline Pankhurst.
Wednesday, February 21, 2024
Absence
Je ne serai pas en cours aujourd’hui car je suis souffrant. Revenez dans quelques jours pour des conseils.
Monday, February 19, 2024
Agrégation cours Irlande du Nord
Bonjour
Il y a eu un malentendu. je viens d'échanger avec M Gillissen. Les cours sur l'Irlande du Nord ne commence pas le 21 février, mais le 28 février.
Voir emploi du temps ici
http://www.jcmullen.fr/edtsem2.pdf
Sunday, February 18, 2024
Malevil
“We’ve got to stop this, it’s stupid.”
I completely agreed, but to stop it, I needed my
whistle (well, Peyssou’s whistle), so I searched, soaked in perspiration, in
all my pockets, without managing to find it. As I searched, I realized, even
through all that anxiety, how ridiculous I was.
The general-in-chief could no longer command his
troops, since he had mislaid his whistle. I could have shouted out “Hold your
fire!” Even Miette and Catie in the fort at the entrance would have heard me.
But I did not do this: I do not know why, but at that
moment it seemed very important to me that things should be done by the book.
I finally found this precious relic. There was nothing
surprising; it was where I had left it, in the breats pocket of my shirt.[1]
I blew three short blasts[2],
and these, when I repeated them a few seconds later, managed to silence our
guns. Yet my whistle must have[3]
awakened some echo in the military spirit of Vilmain, since, from the rampart I
was crouched behind, I heard him screaming at his men “What are you firing at,
you bunch of cretins?[4]”
On that, on both sides, silence replaced the outburst.
To say deathly silence would be overstating the case, since no one had been shot.[5] This
first part of the combat ended in farce and immobility. We did not feel a need
to leave Malevil in search of the enemy, and the enemy had no desire to come forward to meet our bullets, by moving
into a breach of only four or five foot wide.
I did not see what happened next, it was the outside
commando that recounted it to me.
Hervé and Maurice were desperate There had been a
mistake in positioning the blockhouse. It allowed a clear view on people coming
on the Malevil road if they were upright. But as soon as they lay down (and
they did), they were invisible: the grassy ridge of the path hid them
completely. Because of this, Hervé and Maurice could not shoot. What was more, even supposing an enemy were
to stand up, they did not know whether they should shoot or not, since Colin’s
gun remained silent.
Shirt with breast pocket
BNC deadly silence
See also dictionary on ‘deadly’ here : https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/deadly
BNC deathly silence
See also dictionary on deathly, here: https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/deathly
[1] In the breast pocket of my shirt : but then again,
where else do shirts have pockets ? Still, if you knew the expression
« breast pocket » it is no doubt best to use it.
[2] As often, this reminds me of a popular song (from the
1940s). « I blew a little blast on my whistle » by George Formby
Senior. You can listen to it here : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aeXMexIAroo
[3] If you were tempted by any translation other than
« must have », you must urgently read again the modal verbs section
of your Grammaire Explicative de l’Anglais.
[4] Jerks, bloody idiots, etc.
[5] I’m fairly confident that, strictly speaking,
« deathly » is correct (resembling death) and
« deadly » is not (liable to cause death). However the British
national coprus shows that people do use both.
Boussole
“There is no such thing as chance,
everything is linked together”, Sarah would have[1]
said. Why had I just today received by post this article, an old-fashioned
reprint on paper, with staples, rather than a PDF file accompanied by a
covering email (which might[2]
have included some of her news, and which might have let me know where she was
and what this Sarawak place was where she was writing from) ? According to
my atlas, it is a state of Malaysia situated in the North West of the island of
Borneo, just next to Brunei, land of the wealthy sultan, and not far at all
from Debussy’s and Britten’s gamelans, I believe. Yet the content of the
article was quite[3] different : there was no
music in it, apart from, perhaps, a long funeral dirge ; there were twenty
closely printed pages which had been published in the September edition of Representations, a fine journal[4]
from the University of Californa to which she had frequently contributed.
A brief dedication appeared on the cover page
of the article, without any further comment « For you, my dear
Franz, with all my love, Sarah ». It had been posted on November 17th,
that is to say two weeks previously – it still took two weeks for a letter to
travel from Malaysia to Austria ; perhaps she had been a little mean with
the stamps - she could[5]
have put a postcard in too. What was the meaning of all this ? I went
through all I had left of her in my apartment, her articles, two books, a few
photographs and even a copy of her doctoral thesis, printed in a red Skivertex
binding, two heavy volumes weighing more than six pounds each :
« In
life, there are wounds which, like leprosy, eat away at the soul when one is
alone »,[6] writes the Iranian author
Sadegh Hedayat at the beginning of his novel The Blind Owl : the
short man with round spectacles knew this better than anyone else. It was one these
wounds that led him to turn the gas full on in his apartment on the Rue
Championnet in Paris, one night he was feeling particularly lonely, a night in
April, far away from Iran, very far away indeed ; his only company was[7]
a couple of poems written by Omar Khayyam and perhaps an old bottle of Cognac,
or a tablet of opium, or perhaps nothing, nothing at all, apart from the pages
he kept by him and which were taken with him in the vast emptiness of the gas.
Skivertex
[1] By using « would have
said » you avoid the potential ambiguity of « would say ».
[2] We are speaking here of an
imaginary email. « Might » is the best option. The difficulty with
« could » is it suggests physical capacity, which imaginary emails do
not have.
[3] Notice that, here, the word
« quite » means « completely ».
[4] Academics generally write in
journals, not magazines.
[5] Here it i sbest to use
« could » because « might » would be ambiguous.
[6] Be careful with the
distinction between solitude and loneliness.
[7] Note that this cannot be
plural.
L3 podcast and slides McCauley's speech in parliament on the Reform Bill 1831
You will find here the recording of what I had to say about the context of the Reform Bill.
You will find here a recording of the part of the class where I comment on a specific extract.
And you will find here the slides we saw in class.
Monday, February 12, 2024
Djian
Suggested translation of passage by Philippe Djian
Some evenings she could have cried tears of rage. She felt
her life was a real disaster and this made her panic somewhat. And yet the
filming was going well: the rushes were good and more and more people were
congratulating her for her work, and saying they bet she could[1] get
an award for her acting out of it and be
back in the spotlight again.
This promising future, though, did not thrill her as much as
she had thought it would. Now that it was within her reach, the prospect left
her nonplussed; she no longer found it so attractive. She had almost lost that
furious appetite for success which ate away at ninety nine per cent of artists
on the planet- and a hundred per cent in the world of cinema.
Eric Duncalah was perfectly correct
in thinking that a sign from Evy would be able to make her happy, in so far as
that was possible. They missed each other in the mornings, since at Dawn she
was like a stone at the bottom of a well, crushed by leaden sleep or thoroughly
drunk with fatigue. When she heard the coffee machine in action, it was too
late. In the evenings she would do her best to clear her schedule and find time
to be with her son, but she had not yet managed to have a serious conversation
with him about all this, not to mention the fact that they had André under
their feet. What a pain in the neck he
was, that man.
Judith Beverini made use of their
yoga sessions to urge her to get rid of the old bastard- as if anyone in the
house needed a sports room, as if muscle was what the house was short of!
“I wouldn’t put up with it
if I were you ,” said Judith. “And it’s so weird, I reckon. It’d be different
if Rose was there. Really he’s just lurking around the house. At least that’s
what it looks like. How old is he. Brr... he must be 70. Isn’t he?
Judith’s husband had gone
off again to put on The Nutcracker in Nankin, in China, with the communists ,
so the two women could talk on for hours about how men were intrinsically
deceitful and gifted for rudeness and pretence. But all that could not stop
Laure from thinking that first her husband and then her children had abandoned
her one after the other, and this picture terrified her.
[1] There are other
possibilities here, but the sequence of tenses seems to rule out structures
with « may ».
Thomas Paine "The Rights of Man" podcast and slides
You will find here the recording of our class on Tom Paine
And here comments on a couple of extracts from the Rights of Man
You will find here the slides we saw in class
Friday, February 09, 2024
L3 Tom Paine
A left wing comedian, Mark Steel, produced a half hour TV programme which is both funny and educational, about Tom Paine.
Tower
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/feb/09/matchstick-eiffel-tower-guinness-world-records-matches
MEEF M1 December Homework assignment feedback.
MEEF M1 December Homework assignment feedback.
I know that you MEEF M1 people are now hurtling through the second semester and not necessarily thinking back to what happened in your homework assignment at the end of 2023. Nevertheless, this is one of the first times you have attempted an exercise in the format of the CAPES exam, and it is important to identify key errors, in particular in methodology.
I should first say that I very much enjoyed working with you. You were my last MEEF students. Due to my great age, I am retiring in the summer. I will continue doing a little history (which you might find from time to time here or on my YouTube channel « The History Fellow ») as well as several other activities (which are easy to find via Google if required). I am always pleased to hear how you are getting on.
A few of the main points
concerning this assignment.
I have preferred to write here
about the main weaknesses of student work, rather than write comments individually.
This allows me to deal with weaknesses at greater length. It also allows you to
think about weaknesses or mistakes which you did not display in this particular
piece of work but might in a future piece, or at the actual CAPES exam.
The main danger is paraphrase -
simply repeating in your own words what the documents say (this is how to fail
a CAPES).
Many people need to listen again
to my excellent lecture on the history of the UK school system :
Just click here
https://johncmullen.blogspot.com/2023/11/m1-meef-uk-education-system-explained.html
So, to the present exercise :
These three documents all deal
with conflicts and difficulties in the history of UK education. The first gives
a general picture of the post-war reform, and then of changes made forty years
and more later. The second illustrates the anger and resistance of the biggest
teachers’, union faced with neoliberal reforms and competition between schools.
The last compares private schools and state schools and speaks to the
difficulty of giving equal opportunities to every child, and the political
conflicts, in particular between the Conservatives and Labour, connected with
how private schools should be treated by government.
The objectives of the people who
produced the three documents are quite different. Documents one and three are
journalistic in nature : their main aim is to explain to readers facts and
processes (although one can certainly see the opinions of the first journalist
in his writing). The second document, produced by a trade union, has an
agitational objective. It aims at encouraging teachers and headmasters to
refuse to cooperate with the evaluation body OFSTED, since this organization is
considered not to be working in the interests of schools, children and
teachers.
Each of the documents contains
several references to events or actors in the history of UK education. You
would not have time to explain them all, and there are probably some you do not
understand. Nevertheless, you must explain quite a few of them.
Obviously, you get points
for ( among other things) understanding the history and organization of UK
schools. So, you would obviously get points for :
-
Showing you
know what OFSTED is and does, and why many teachers oppose it.
-
Showing you
know what a GCSE is, how the system works, and the difference with the French
baccalaureate system.
-
Showing you
know exactly what the eleven plus was, and why it disappeared. Most
importantly, what kind of ideas were behind the eleven plus system, and why
these ideas are not accepted today.
(Read here :
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eleven-plus )
And this article recounts the
history of debates about the eleven plus back in the 1940s and 1950s
https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdf/30180127.pdf
(You will find here a rather
right-wing documentary about the history of the eleven plus, but which includes
a lot of useful information).
https://youtu.be/6WEHIKAuYto?si=NTx4l5KfD51LDq_Ox
-
Showing you
know something about the 1944 Act which is not mentioned in the documents ( e g
its establishment of the tripartite system, with the eleven plus, and the idea
of innate intelligence which was behind this decision).
-
Showing you
know *how* church schools fit into the national system.
-
Showing you
know the importance of Local Education Authorities in the history of UK
education, and why this influence declined in the 1980s.
-
Showing you
know that the 1988 reforms were part of Thatcherism, and how they fit in with
the rest of Thatcherism, indeed showing you know what Thatcherism is.
-
Saying who Rab
Butler is, what political party he comes from, etc.
-
Showing you
know what kind of newspaper The Guardian is and what sort of people read it.
It is important to refer immediately, at the very
beginning of your work, to the intentions of each author, and to
structure your work around what the documents are trying to do.
Most students quote too much. The
examiner has read the documents. Line numbers are enough.
Remember to only include details
which help us to understand the document, and the history of education. If you
say that Rab Butler was a Conservative politician, this is important since it
might show that the need of the British economy for educated workers pushed the
Conservative Party to partly abandon some of their traditional elitism. This
detail helps us understand the history.
On the other hand, the fact that
Toby Helm worked for a few years in Berlin is not relevant to this set of
documents. If Mr Helm’s article had dealt with the relationship between the UK
and Germany, it would have been relevant to mention his link to Berlin.ç
One of the biggest dangers is
paraphrase. If you summarize the documents in your own words, instead of
analyzing what the document is trying to do or how it reflects historical
situations and changes, this is not good. You need to show you know things *which
are not in the document*.
Note that both the introduction
and the conclusion should concern how the documents help us to understand
British society and its education system. Your conclusion should not be
advice about what the governments*should do* or about what the education system
« really needs ». Your position is one of a student of British
society, trying to explain how a situation came about and how it is changing.
Your position is not advisor to the British government.
At the very beginning, try to be
as precise as possible. « These three documents all deal with aspects of
education in Britain » is weak, because it is so obvious. Noone would
expect one of the documents to talk about dolphins! What do they have in common
which is more precise ? No doubt conflict. They show how different ideas about
education - egalitarianism, elitism and neoliberalism in particular, have been
in tension as they produced a modern education system.
Monday, February 05, 2024
L3 John Locke A letter on toleration
All this may be useful to you when revision time comes.
You will find here a
recording of the introduction I gave to to John Locke’s pamphlet (context, Reformation,
Enlightenment etc).
And you will find here a
recording of the part of the class where I analyzed a section of the document.
The slides you saw in
class are also available.
L3 orals - exam
Someone asked me about the exact format of the oral exam. You are given an extract of a couple of paragraphs of one of the documents, we worked on in class. (But not the exact lines analyzed in class - another part sof the document). You are not asked to choose between two possible extracts - you are simply given one.