Anyone in France with a DC doing the new Bac?

[Booboostwo]

Specifically the LLCE Anglais?

I am trying to help the daughters of two friends with this. I assumed they would need a little bit of general support but this new Bac seems to be a huge mess. Has anyone seen this?

eduscol.education.fr/cid141765/sujets-zero-bac-2021.html

If I am not mistaken it’s sample papers just released. The LLCE anglais is insanely difficult! I am a native speaker and have three HE degrees (not in English lit thought) and I would find it a challenge.

Does anyone understand if the students would have a choice between the 4 different themed questions and how many they would need to answer? Does anyone know which books/films/plays this year’s Bac covers specifically?

I found a list that includes
Animal Farm
Of Mice and Men
The Curious Incident...
Two Edgar Allan Poe poems
The Importance of being...
West side Story
And one or two more I forget now.

Is this the right list? Do they have to cover all of these?
What about themes? The ones in the exam are quite specific, could just about anything come up?

Both DCs are working on the Bac in school but what they have been working on doesn’t relate to this sample exam at all.

Gentle bump just in case.

Do you have an AGGREG or CAPES? Do you teach in Lycee? If not, I really don't think you are able to help your friend's daughters, in fact you could actively mislead them. The way the French bac is taught - and the way they're supposed to answer - is very specific and formulaic. They need to meet with their own English prof at school and find more about the 2021 bac and/or find a tutor who is a teacher in a Lycée. This cannot be "invented". I am not saying that all is clear for the new Bac - in fact it will be interesting to learn more from anyone experiencing it - but for the questions they do seem to me very typical of French bac and Lycée style teaching.

I do not have any of these qualifications nor do I teach in a Lycee. I am however an academic with decades of experience teaching.

I do get what you say about the special nature of the Bac, e.g. if you don’t follow the methodologie for philosophy you don’t stand a chance even though this way of writing has nothing to do with philosophy and is entirely invented for the French Bac.

The new Bac is supposed to encourage Anglo-Salonica critical thinking skills (not my term, but the French governments) but they seem to be making it up as they go along. Have you seen the sujet 0? It includes works that were not in the original bulletin despite the fact that it covered a couple of hundred items. How are French students working in a foreign language supposed to analyze an extract from Midsummer’s Night Dream when they haven’t even read it before much less studied it?

Teaching in the lycees here can be dire. One of the teachers started the year with Animal Farm but neglected to say anything about the Russian revolution or explain analogies, metaphors and allegories. She is giving out marks from 3 to 12 out of 20 and cannot say what the right answers she is looking for might even be. I could do better than this if I taught the Bac in my sleep.

Anglo-Saxonic even! it’s not a British-Hellenic style!

It does specifically say “ Les sujets ci-après portent, par choix, sur des œuvres et des parcours associés qui ne figurent pas dans le programme limitatif national de l'année scolaire 2019-2020. Ces sujets visent en effet à mettre en évidence les démarches intellectuelles des épreuves et leurs attendus.”

“Teaching in the lycees here can be dire. One of the teachers started the year with Animal Farm but neglected to say anything about the Russian revolution or explain analogies, metaphors and allegories. She is giving out marks from 3 to 12 out of 20 and cannot say what the right answers she is looking for might even be. ”. Isn’t this why parents choose a good Catholic school or private school in France, for consistency’s sake?

“I am however an academic with decades of experience teaching” - but if this is not in France then it really does not count. Within Europe, there are no two education systems more different than French and British. The criteria of success and what is expected to get good marks are wholly different. And the level of misunderstanding works both ways - for example you cannot study Medicine in England if you have a French bac (even specialised in Biology).

There is a long list of works, about a couple of hundred novels, poems, theatre plays, films and even paintings. From this list a smaller selection of about seven to ten is published and will be taught in that year.

The sujet 0 was not on this year’s choices obviously as that would be giving away potential exam questions, but was not all from the longer list either? What is achieved by that? Since there is also a list of themes that will be covered why give sample questions that relate to only some of the hundreds of possible options and introduce some new parameters? Not only are there new works but some of the specific questions relate to concepts that are not even mentioned under the theme descriptor. Given how narrow the questions are and how little room there is for interpretation, if the concepts also come out of nowhere the whole thing is impossible to prepare for.

The sujet 0 are there to show the format of the exam, because it is completely unlike what we had before (where the foreign lit element was just an oral). They will have 2 lots of exams, the tronc commun (what everyone does) and then the LLCE. We have a list of set texts from which 2 must be studied in their entirety, the other texts are suggestions. I am surprised at someone teaching Animal Farm without teaching about the Russian revolution, Orwell's critical writings or teaching specifics for literary criticism.
What you need to look at is the bulletin officiel to get the proper information. I have a meeting with the top brass inspectors on Tuesday about implementing the new Bac so I may know more then.

Thank you so much Madamefrog!

Yes the Animal Farm teacher is very lost. She’s using a GCSE guide for Animal Farm but can’t even figure that one out.

My question about the sujet 0 mock paper is this:
The questions in it are closed and narrow
but the texts they refer to are not even in the long list of possible texts
and each question includes a painting/poster which could be anything and requires art rather than literature analysis
and the concepts corresponding to the themes are not all part of the course descriptor...

Given all that how does one narrow down what will be asked? Studying two of the 2019-2020 list texts doesn’t get you anywhere even if one knows them inside out. Given how they formed the sujet 0 anything could come up in the exam.

Add to this that the students are working in a foreign language with a limited vocabulary and it makes the teaching task impossible.

Sorry, for the derail but this is in reply to @bloomwild - you're wrong about not being able to study medicine in England after doing a French bacc. My Dd is currently in her first year of medicine in the UK after getting her bacc this summer. She did maths as her speciality, not biology.

Whether this would be possible with the new bacc I don't know. However the UK medical schools she applied to seemed to appreciate the fact that to do well you have to work solidly for 2 of the 3 years across a huge range of subjects.

bloomwild I am not homeschooling these two girls, they are also going to schools which are supposed to teach them, so even if I am entirely incompetent what I do merely adds to what they are already learning. And while no two systems of education are identical I am not trying to teach them the A level, I am trying to teach them the new Bac, which is exactly the point of the question. I did manage to get last year's student to a 16 in the philosophy exam when she hadn't managed to get a mark over 12 in class with a teacher who attributed Kant's ideas on aesthetic to some bloke called Berger (no insult intended to Mr Berger but he really cannot lay claim to Kant).

Wow, really ? That’s great. These medical schools say French Bac is not acceptable for medicine: UCL, Imperial, Ox, Camb, Birmingham, Manchester, York, Bristol, UEA, Liverpool, Kings, Queen mary’s. Without outing, can you give an approx idea of which unis accepted your DC ?

@frozentree

@ bloomwild - She's at UEA - they offered her a moyenne of 15, with 15 in physics/chem, SVT and one other. She got 14.5 overall, 17 in SVT, 12 in physics/chem and still got in. She also had an interview at Aberdeen but didn't get an offer. She also applied to Sheffield but missed the cut with her UKCAT.

That is one of the most helpful posts on mumsnet, for me, ever - really made the weekend. Thank you so much.

Happy to be of help - it was a very long summer 2019 as she had to wait for the A-levels results before they would accept her!

Interestingly (and this is quite obvious when you think about it), she has said her biology level is nowhere near as high as everyone else's (A-level) but it doesn't seem to matter. She is absolutely loving it and is desperately trying not to be too smug about how she spends one day a week already in a surgery and has had 2 weeks solid in hospital when talking to French friends doing PACES.

"The questions in it are closed and narrow
but the texts they refer to are not even in the long list of possible texts
and each question includes a painting/poster which could be anything and requires art rather than literature analysis
and the concepts corresponding to the themes are not all part of the course descriptor..."
This is because the sujets 0 were hashed out by groups of co-opted teachers some of whom hadn't even taught LELE or LVA before. I examine both and am often horrified. I think the new Bac is a complete shambles, there are supposed to be training sessions about what is going to happen etc but we haven't had them. Our boss the minister is an ideologue with no concern beyond cutting costs.

Oh and naturally we have iconographic documents (what you simple Anglosaxons would call a picture 😉) because it is Language Literature and Culture we are studying, so all sorts really.

That’s both depressing and reassuring, in the sense that at least it’s not me who is missing something obvious.

I think I might help the girls understand all texts on this year’s list even if they have to read them in summary and see if we can relate them to the concepts in the themes. There seems to be an element of text comparison which I think they have already worked on in French so that’s something.

Haha, I am Greek, it would be iconography for me too! 🤣🤣🤣

@Booboostwo

I can't help with you OP I'm afraid but I was wondering if you can point to the resources you used in philo (if they are online) for DS who doing the old Bac next summer.

There are a few books that set out the methodologie like this one
www.amazon.fr/ABC-Excellence-Philosophie-Term-L-ES-S/dp/2091503266/ref=sr_1_2?keywords=philo+bac&qid=1575187941&s=books&sr=1-2

It goes something like this:
Introduction: give definitions of terms and say how you understand the question - reformulation of the problem
Part 1: give a possible answer and an objection to it
Part 2: give an opposite possible answer and an objection to it
Part 3: synthesize the correct answer from the above, you can introduce a third possibility at this stage

Part 3 is supposed to be the best bit, so keep the best ideas for this part.
Brief Conclusion.

Disclaimer: the French Bac is the only time you ever need this methodologie.

For specific content, it depends which Bac he is doing. I would advise he learn 4-5 big themes with 2-3 for and against ideas for each one, with some references to the works of philosophers (references to ancient and classic philosophers are rated more highly than modern examples, personal experience or original critical thinking).

Thank you. He is doing the Bac S next June.