A Ban on Homework?

KidsinFrance web-site has an item on the appeal by French teachers and parents to ban all homework for two weeks:

Teachers and parents groups are calling for a fortnight's homework ban - starting today - to raise the issue of whether homework helps pupils or, on the contrary, is counterproductive. The FCPE, one of the main parents' associations, and the Icem (Icem-Pedagogie Freinet) are inviting parents and teachers to post their comments on the website 'Ce soir pas de devoirs' (no homework tonight).

Well, with children's schoolday longer than the legally permitted workday for adults, why not extend it for the whole year? Comments on kidsinfrance seem to support the idea.

Image: wikimedia

OK1 (French Netspeak)

Marianne Semeuse.

Franglais is about borrowing Anglo-American words and phrases into French. 

But the French are as inventive with their own version of netspeak as English-speakers. Not least because phonetically read English alpha-numeric contractions, like gr8, mean nothing to a French-speaker. What's 'grhuit'?

Instead, the French are introducing new contractions in internet French and SMS conversations.

Here are a few examples:

-  A+ or @+: means “À plus“, like “later”, or “l8r”.
- ASV: “Âge, Sexe, Ville”, the equivalent of the English “ASL”, or “Age/Sex/Location”.
- b1sur: “Bien sûr“: Of course. The “1″, “un“, makes up for the syllable “-ien.”
- ENTK: “En tout cas”, means ”in any case”.
- OK1: “Aucun“, “none” or ”no one”.
- STP or SVP: “S’il te plait”, “please”.
- TNKT: Means “T’inquiètes“, or “t’inquiètes pas”, meaning “don’t worry” or “no worries”.
- X: Since the word for cross in French ”Croix” is the same for the verb croire (to believe), for the second, you can use just an X, as in “Crois-moi“ or “X moi“, (believe me!)

- via Patricia Mansfield-Devine, SecondCherry - the over-40s babe. Thanks, Trish.