Paul from Paris

Après avoir participé pendant des années aux jurys d’admission et de recrutement, voici quatre conseils à l’attention de mes étudiants :

1. Ne pas devenir un candidat professionnel ; le CV est un moyen, pas une fin. Tout CV peut être analysé, décortiqué, critiqué, perfectionné. Son objet est de présenter le candidat de manière succincte et de donner envie à son lecteur de l’interviewer (voire de lui faire une proposition). Le CV est un outil de sélection, de qualification. Chercher la perfection à travers un CV est un leurre et une perte de temps.
2. Au lieu de présenter beaucoup d’informations, privilégier plutôt la bonne présentation de quelques informations. L’entrepreneur Guy Kawasaki préconise une règle 1/2/3 : une page, deux points clés (dont le lecteur devrait se souvenir pour se rappeler de vous), trois parties. Trop d’information tue l’information.
3. L’ordre chronologique inverse. Ce que vous faîtes maintenant est autrement plus déterminant que votre situation d’il y a cinq ans.
4. Ne fabulez pas, n’inventez pas. Vous vous sentez obligé d’inventer ou d’exagérer afin de vous aligner sur d’hypothétiques attentes ? Vous ne vous sentez pas à la hauteur du recruteur tel que vous êtes ? Pourquoi ? Si vous méritez d’être sélectionné (c’est-à-dire, invité pour passer un entretien), pourquoi mettre en péril votre crédibilité ? Si vous pensez ne pas être à la hauteur, pourquoi postuler ? En cas d’une sélection chanceuse, qu’est-ce qui vous permet d’espérer une réussite future ? Si vous estimez souffrir de lacunes, comment pensez-vous les combler ? Comment une lettre d’admission ou un offre d’emploi peut-elle vous apporter des qualités que vous estimez manquer ?

In France today, the school calendar sets the back beat to which life goes on, for everybody.

More than the calendar or holidays (be they religious or secular), the school calendar provides a rhythm familiar and comforting to all.

In France, the school year ends with a bang: the baccalauréat examination, administered to all students in their final year of secondary school. For these teens, the baccalauréat marks the end of secondary school and opens the door to higher education.

The baccalauréat has long been a rite of passage, but today increasingly is a right of passage: as success rates reach 80%, the baccalauréat is less a wall to climb than a hoop to jump through.

There exist many kinds of baccalauréats. The one in the public eye is the general baccalauréat, intended for students who plan to go on to higher education next year. It starts with a bang: the philosophy test. This attracts much attention from the media and ordinary folk. The philosophy questions put to students this year (which they have to answer in four hours) are (all translations mine):

• Does happiness depend on us?
• Can art do without rules?
• Can the search for truth be disinterested?
• Must we forget the past to have a future?
• Can a scientific truth be dangerous?
• Is it the historian’s role to judge?

Students choose between two questions; I’ve grouped the choices offered to different groups of students.

I’ve long admired the high-mindedness of the philosophy test, and the expectation that teens can respond to the questions presented with reasoned argument.

An American reader pointed out to me that young people do not only excel at sports, but can also accomplish remarkable studies in math and science.

In the United States, the Society for Science & the Public has run a contest for students in their final year of secondary school. From 1942 through 1997, Westinghouse sponsored the contest; since 1998, Intel has sponsored it.

The Intel Science Talent Search fields about 1,600 entries from young people who do independent (individual, original) research in math and science. Each entrant submits:

• a 20-page research report;
• a statement from a supervising scientist;
• recommendations from teachers;
• details on educational and personal background;
• various essays that:
  • abstract the research project (akin to what a scientific journal would print);
  • summarize the research in plain-language;
  • answer the question: What is a major scientific question in your field whose answer you believe will have a significant impact on the world in the next 20 years, and why?
  • answer the question: What have you done that illustrates scientific attitude, curiosity, inventiveness, and initiative? (The STS is not for the modest.)

An initial round of judging yields 300 semifinalists; each receives $1,000, and his or her school also receives $1,000. A pool of 40 finalists is invited for a week in Washington, D.C., for additional judging, cultural events, and group interaction. All receive at least $7,500 in awards. The top ten finalists receive larger awards, culminating in a $100,000 award for the first-place winner. The awards are intended to finance higher education.

Intel and the Society for Science & the Public generously posted short presentations by finalists.

This year’s first-place winner is Erika de Benedictis, from Albuquerque, New Mexico; she investigated spacecraft navigation.

The second-place winner this year is David Liu, from Saratoga, California; he developed a system to recognize and understand digital images (and tells a great story about his consulting experience).

The 2010 third-place winner is Akhil Mathew, from Madison, New Jersey; his math project examined Deligne categories.

Nearly all the finalists would like to attend the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), which deserves an award for its outreach and marketing among  scientifically inclined youth.

The Intel STS comforts those who are concerned about scientific talent in the United States. To my European friends, I would ask: why isn’t a similar contest done in Europe?

I have a daughter in elementary school, a French school in Paris, the city that I call home.

My daughter and her schoolmates read books, then write book reports on the books they have read. They started doing this at the beginning of the school year, and read several books throughout the school year (and during school vacations).

Everyone in my daughter’s class –the fifth grade– writes their book report in French. The books they read are all in French. But the books they read are translations, books originally written in a language other than French.

“All the books are translations?” I asked my daughter, doubtfully. She assured me that this was so. Most students read books originally written in English (or in “American”: French translators distinguish the two). Occasionally a student reads a book originally written in a more exotic language, such as Russian.

I solicited my daughter’s support to monitor her class’ reading habits. Surely, I thought, they’ll get around to reading books in French, originally written in French.

Six months later, my daughter’s assessment remains unchanged: all the students, without exception, have read books translated into French from another language.

My daughter is partial to an English series about young spies. Her classmates seem to have diverse and wide-ranging tastes. The class is not under the sway of any particular author or genre.

There are plenty of publishes in France that offer “senior child” or young adult titles. There is also, in France, a generations-old program to subsidize publications for youth. Of course, there are French authors who write for younger readers.

Why does this supply not encounter greater demand? Why do French consumers, when offered a choice, choose foreign over French writers? I have two hypotheses:

• First, foreign writers have already proven their success in a home market. Put differently, French publishers (only) translate titles that have sold (well) elsewhere. A kind of natural selection pits proven foreign writers against a broader range of French writers. This might explain a bias or skew towards writers translated into French, but not why young people would read only these writers.
• Second, foreign authors write in ways that French authors don’t. I don’t know whether literary critics have looked into this –how writers for young people write– but I think it’s a promising avenue for research. Although French writers write stories set in the past or in fantasy other-worlds, I find them thinly imagined, at least compared to English-language works. And French fiction in a realist vein tends, in my view, towards preachy and didactic works that unduly constrain their protagonists (and the imaginations of their readers).

Paris elementary school, built before coeducation

Boys and girls go to school together in France. It has not always been thus. Coeducation in France is comparatively recent.

In 1886, a law was passed to authorize elementary coeducation in very small hamlets, with a population under 500. In my imagination, these would be one-room schools. This was clearly the exception; the norm was separate schooling for boys and girls. Even in small towns (with a population over 500), there would be two schools: one for boys, another for girls.

This situation continued through the two world wars and the postwar reconstruction.

In France, the emergence of coeducation is contemporaneous with the birth of the European political project:

• in 1959, coeducation became possible in newly-built high schools;
• in 1963, middle schools moved towards coeducation;
• in 1975, coeducation became the norm in public schools.

Today, only a sliver of French schoolchildren attend a single-sex school. In my Paris neighborhood, even parochial schools that seem friendly to reactionary causes are coeducational.

French people seem to place great stock in opinion polls. The Wyeth foundation for child and adolescent health recently commissioned a survey carried out by French pollster Ipsos. The heart of the survey, as I read it, concerned difference, normalcy, and conformity. But the part of the survey that received intensive media attention in France concerned sex or gender difference. Reports tended to underscore conservative or retrograde gender roles espoused by teens.

Some of the survey results will come as no surprise. For example, teen-age boys report spending more time than girls on video games and sports; teenage girls say they spend more time than boys on the telephone or doing household chores. This having been said, the self-reported difference on time spent on household chores was 0.1 hour, or six minutes, per day, on average. (Some parents of teens may express surprise that either boys or girls reported spending even six minutes a day on household chores.)

Attention given to other survey results seems mostly to reflect preoccupations of newspaper readers or television viewers. For example, 92% of teenage girls surveyed agree that men and women should share household chores, a position shared by (only) 69% of boys, with less strength in conviction. (Although the adolescents surveyed apparently live at home, the poll does not seem to have solicited views whether children should assume primary responsibility for household chores.)