My niece is 17 years old, which, here in France means that this year she passes the ‘bac’ or baccalaureate (the equivalent to the UK’s A levels).
She’s certainly not a stupid girl, and works hard (as can be seen by her continuous assessment scores throughout the year.) Tuesday was the day for her English oral exam – and at 10am we got the news…
Her English tutor had advised them on their choice of discours etc. and the class had made their arguments etc. etc. She, and some others, had chosen to discuss global warming. The point of the exercise is to see how the students develop, and present, their arguments in a foreign language (in this case, English).
The clock was started and she started her presentation – only to be stopped halfway through (with the examiner pausing the clock) to be criticized for her choice of subject, and the fact that she had criticized Donald Trump. It turns out that the (anonymous) examiner was a young American woman, supporter of the Trump and also a fervent critic of global warming.
The clock was restarted and my niece finished her discours. She related this to her mother who then passed it on to the family – we were astonished – this simply will not do – the examiner is there to judge the students capacities, not opinions.
Sadly, despite a brief search, I can’t (yet) find out who this person is – I would dearly like to ‘discuss’ things with her.
We will learn her marks on the 5th of July – fortunately these will be aggregated with her continuous assessment scores, so with a bit of luck she won’t suffer too much. It’s sad, because she doesn’t deserve this kind of treatment, but it goes to show that Trump gets everywhere – and manages to screw more up than we could ever have imagined….
