English Lessons in Grenoble

Lesson 1 :

The professor was really ill so we worked in the computer room on a computer skill. We have to do three sections: vocabulary, reading and writing.

We answered many questions. For example in the reading part, we will have to read a text and some questions about this text. They want to know if we can search rapidly information in a text and if we are able to synthesize a lot of data.

After each question we have our results and we can read a feedback.

Lesson 2:

I was sick.

Lesson 3:

We watched a documentary about the Physicist Feynman. We had to take notes. We made groups and compared our notes. Then, the teacher asked us questions about the documentary. At home, we had to write a summary

Questions about the documentary:

1) What is the name of the project in which Feynam was working during the war?

It’s the Manhattan project. It’s a US Army project to develop the atomic bomb.

2) Why did he get married in 1941?

His wife was ill. It was the only way at this period to take care of her.

3) When the war had ended, what does Feynman say was the reason he continued to trying to make bigger bombs?

It was just to succeed in his researche.

4) Whet did he think about bombs one day in NY?

Don’t build anything, it will be destroyed by the bombs.

5) What was the agreement with the artist?

On Sunday Feynman gives a physics course to the artist and the artist gives an art course.

6) Who explained the principles of matter, radiations in 1928?

Heisenberg and Dirac

7) What did Feynman add to their theory?

How are the electrons “represented”?

Both e+ and e- as particles.

9) Freeman Dyson said that “the greatest” physicist of the time needed convincing that Feynman’s work was valid.

Who was that?

Oppenheimer.

10) What happened between Feynman and the National Academy of Science?

He doesn’t like honours. He resigned and he went to the academy.

Summary of the documentary:

Feynman is a famous physicist.

Before the war he was working on Quantum Electrodynamics. As a teacher, he always explained the link between theory and experiment.

In 1941, he got married to Arline. She was sick. The only way to take care of her at this period was to be married to her. She died few years after their wedding.

During the war he stopped his research about Quantum Electrodynamics and worked on the Manhattan project. It is the wartime U.S Army project at Los Alamos developing the atomic bomb. He didn’t think about the consequences on the people, the environment. The only thing he wanted was to succeed.

He met an artist. They made a deal: Feynman would give a physics lesson to the artist one sunday and the artist teach art to Feynman next Sunday. They could speak about beauty for example from two different points of view: the artist’s and the scientist’s.

After the war, Feynman continued his research on QED. He tried to simplify mathematical difficulties with particle diagrams.

In 1965, he received the Nobel Prize for his work about QED. There were three of them to have this prize about the same subject because they had got their results at the same time.

Feynman didn’t like honours or he resigned and from the Academy of Science.

Lesson 4:

We opened our Blog and we did two exercices about day and time.

Exercise 1: synonym

1) Day in day out=every single day

2) Call it a day=stop

3) That’ll be the day!=that’s very unlikely

4) A red-letter day=special day

5) Daydreaming=thinking pleasant thoughts

6) It’ll make his day=make happy

7) One of these days=eventually

One of those days=a bad day

9) Scared the living daylights out ofhim=terrify

10) It’s not my day today=being unlucky

11) Those were the days=that was a very wonderful period

Exercise 2: Fill the gaps in the sentence

1) Legends have been told for the time immemorial and they are still being told today.

2) Folk stories often begin with the words: once upon a time.

3) I haven’t received a reply from my friend, it’s about time he wrote back.

4) You only have to do two writing tasks in the exam but there’s two-hour time-limit.

5) You can borrow the book, I don’t need it for the time being.

6) There’s no quick and easy way to learn idiom, it’s a time consuming again.

7) I’ve warned him time and time again that he should be more careful but half the time he just doesn’t seem to take any notice. You know , at times I feel that I’m wasting my time talking to him.

A good actor or comedian has to have good timing when on stage.

9) There’s no hurry, so you can take your time and do the work in your own time.

10) We didn’t manage to get there in time for the start of the meeting-it had already begun.

11) If you go to Disneyland I’m sure you ‘ll have the time of your life.

12) Next time we’ll try to be there on time.

Lesson 5:

We listened to a lecture for teachers on internet about “RSS: The new killer app for education”.

The RSS (Really Simple Syndication or Rich Site Summary) is a family of web feeds formats used to publish frequently updated content such as blog entries, news headlines or podcasts.

An RSS feed contains either a summary of content from an associated web site or the full text. Many traditional medias have created RSS feeds.

The advantages for a teacher to use RSS reader’s are that they can have more control, more content and it takes less time to find informations.

Lesson 6:

First, we read a text about “power walking”. The aim of this reading was to learn how to search on wordreference.

Wordreference is already the site I use to search the meaning of words.

Then, we made groups. Each group had to read a text and to make a presentation with a transparency.

Our text was about Ultrahigh-vacuum motion systems.

With this kind of exercise, you can learn to make a presentation. When we listened the other groups you see what is good what is not good. For example, you have to pay intention to do not write too much on the transparency. It must be clear.

Lesson 7:

First we did an exercise about English expressions.

Then, we spoke about abstracts. An abstract is a kind of summary that you can find at the beginning of a publication (for example: a scientific publication). It is important for a scientist to know how to write an abstract. It’s necessary to include typical elements such as a sentence about the principal activity and its scope, some information about the methodology, a few words about the most important results of the study and then a conclusion.

Lesson 8:

It was our last lesson. We read a text about Recycling CO2 into Petrol and we had to synthetize it in a diagram.

Poster Presentation (the 11th of March):

The other English groups had to do a poster about a scientific subject. I went to look at all these posters.

I decided to speak about two of them: the Aurora (I choose this one because I said I saw the northern lights in my Sweden page) and the Scanning Tunneling Microscope. I asked question to the student who were introducing the poster and made a summary.

The Aurora (or the coronal mass ejection effect on the earth):

When the particles (from the sun) arrive on the Earth, they are stopped by the magnetosheat due to the magnetic field of the earth. They follow the magnetic lines. Then, they enter in the atmosphere where they collide with atoms and molecules. These collisions excite the atoms and molecules. The excitation energy can be lost by light emission or collisions. Most aurorae are green and red emission from atomic oxygen. Molecular nitrogen and nitrogen ions produce some low level red and very high blue/violet aurorae.

The STM:

The scanning tunneling microscope uses tunneling. When a tip conductor very thin is approaching to a sample conductor at a distance of 1nm: a current called tunneling is appearing between the tip and the surface of the sample. This current is proportional to the distance tip/sample. Tunneling is very sensitive to the distance because at 2nm it disappears.

With this microscope you can see a surface at the atomic scale.