MEEF

Hello to you MEEF students, CAPES wannabes and future fellow colleagues, a few words to welcome you to the master MEEF course. I hope for you that this will be a fruitful and successful year for you all, and that obtaining the CAPES will mean a future job for life. Some of you will know me from the Licence cursus, L1-L3, some of you will not have had that doubtful pleasure! I am originally English, having lived in Alsace for 35 years and have been working at the FLSH for 20 years, teaching literature and translation in all years from L1 to M2. I teach composition (you will suffer me in Semester One working in collaboration with Laurent Curelly) and translation, thème, (translation into English, to be precise) in both semesters for both years. The video below will hopefully give you a few pointers : how we are going to work together this semester, I am going to be online and off campus, unfortunately; how to organise your own timetable; how to make work a pleasure (really??) to achieve your goals.

You will feel that this year will be a rich and exciting one, a lot of work, but believe you me, holding down a full-time job, a family, and a bit of research, personal for me, on the side is a full-time life!! There is always the old assumption that teachers only work 18 hours a week : well, to spite those who tell me so, I tell them that we work 35 hours… a month, and have 20 weeks holiday a year… why don’t they try it???!!  Seriously, it’s more like 18 hours a day at the beginning, but the load does get lighter as you move further in your career. So pace yourselves and be prepared to put the hours in to get the results. Don’t take this year as “I will see what happens” because you will not succeed…(unless you are a genius); it needs 200% effort and then you’ve got a good chance of success. I will be sending you emails and texts via your UHA email address to help you keep pace and we will organise ZOOM or Googlemeet once things have started for real. Try and get yourselves working as a group, two or three persons to enable you to progress. All the best!