Music lover and English teacher with an interest in slightly geeky things

mastodon / blog / listenbrainz

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Cake day: June 8th, 2023

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  • An old friend of mine that I’ve lost touch with is Chinese. They lived in Europe for a number of years. When they couldn’t get a new job their visa ran out and the went back home.

    No problem getting a job. They had a place to live. Things were good.

    But… When they left Europe they basically told their roommate, a student who was about 10 years their younger, that they were leaving and that’s it. They abandoned the apartment. This left not only rent up to the student, but also the €300 fee of changing the name on the rental contract.

    If a police investigation is launched against someone in China, you can be damned sure they will turn up something. If this influencer ever saw a doobie they will find out, and if they never did drugs they will find an acquaintance who did.

    I say this because one day when my friend left work there was a car waiting. It was the father of her roommate. Turns out he was a “special” police officer. He told them to get in and gave her a folder. The folder had photos of them, their friends, even me. There were notes on the friends, SMS and social media exchanges. This included references to drugs. He took them to a bank, told them to take out the equivalent of €900 (he had their bank statements already) or their family would hear about this…and then he left them there on the street.







  • This shocked me as well because my parents weren’t involved with my work or education after finishing high school.

    In France, this is not the case. The majority of people are supported by their parents until the end of secondary education, especially when it comes to my students who are all in private institutions.

    It is extremely rare for a student to have a job, for example.

    Parents do get involved for even minor things, and will come stomping into the school flanked by a lawyer.

    Why would they be involved?

    Because they pay. That’s all.

    Now, university is practically free and lots of students get a bursary (not a loan) to help them along. But, their parents will still pay rent sometimes because a full-time student with a job is seen as the most amazing thing here.

    I will often bring up this stark contrast to how when I was a student I had 4 different jobs and still ended my studies 60k in debt and didn’t even see my parents during the school year, let alone get any money from them.



  • I am a professor as several different schools in France (business, notarial studies, agricultural engineers, communication). I would day 95% of my students are from well-to-do families. But, most of them are required to find paid internships. The notary students usually get unpaid internships.

    As an internship advisor, I can confirm one thing: paid or not, they put in the hours and take the same crap as a paid employee. Sometimes it is worse. For example, if an intern is absent from work, the message gets to me, and I send it up the chain of command and sometimes parents get involved. It is stressful for the students. My business students get paid internships (about €1400/month) but still need help from their parents and many of them will be doing something they don’t really want to do (think finance instead of marketing).

    Now, being a professor I am in contact with a rather large network of of profs spanning the private and public sector… My colleagues from the public sector are worried about this looming change to laws. It would lead to an overhaul of the system as the internship is counted as a credit. If it is decided that they should be paid, how many companies will want to pay when they can just hire a part-timer for the summer?


  • I’ve told this tale 3 years running now:

    I work at an international business school. I try to stay up to day on world news. There was a paragraph written about “infectious pneumonia” in Time magazine or The Economist the last week of 2019 (so the issue published the first week of 2020, I think).

    Returning to work a week later I mentioned it in class, because that year I had about 6 students from different parts of China.

    They said, “it’s nothing, just a flu.”

    The next week, as numbers started to be published they said, “no, it’s an exaggeration.”

    The week after they were the first students to start wearing masks.

    Week 4, they told us they hadn’t heard from their families in several days. This would have been February 2020.

    I felt so horrible for those students that year. They were only 18 or 19 years old. Sent to France in January 2019 (they are required to come several months before classes start in order to learn French and pass some tests). They were locked down March 16th 2020 and forced to take lessons on Zoom. Unable to return home for the summer. Took another semester on Zoom, etc., etc.…

    I think they finally managed to head home in the spring of 2021.