My First Classes

I have now started classes and am almost done with my third week of school here in Lyon. Thus far I have been less than impressed with the classes themselves. We have block schedules, which means that we essentially have one class per week, 6 hours a day, Mon-Thursday. On Friday we receive our final via email and have 72 hours to complete it. Come Monday, it all repeats.

Last week I had International Criminal Law, a far cry from anything I have taken before. Our professor was a very nice Egyptian Professor (the Dean of the School of Law at the University of Cairo), who was lacking somewhat in the "captivating" category. He insisted on reading straight from prepared text and seems to be reading from copies of a book, on which he would take periodic notes. We all decided that he was writing a book and editing it as he taught. He also insisted on rolling the letter "R" in every word, which was quite entertaining. In the end, it was an overload on latin criminal law principle and he did an effective job of turning what could have been a very interesting subject, insanely mind numbing. This culminated in our final: "Defenses, Justifications, or Excuses for Criminal International Law. Discuss." It was really quite easy, however, the lack guidance on page length, outside research, etc...required us to try and figure out what he wanted.

This week we have International Labor law, a class that actually made us miss the friendly Egyptian. The woman's Spanish accent is difficult at times and in general she is very disorganized in here teaching style. Additionally, her final exam contained numerous mistakes and we actually had to email her multiple times for clarifications. Oh well. I am still in France :-)