Today's contemporary history lesson

We discussed the essays we did yesterday - What does today's France owe to the Revolution and the Empire (1789 - 1815). It was quite an interesting session because we compared and contrasted politics, social conditions, devolution and centralisation, living standards, corruption and so on in our various countries, which were:

Brazil, England (that's me. O the shame of it!), France, Russia, Turkey and Vietnam.

It was most interesting to compare the attitudes and aspirations of our Vietnamese friend and our Russian friend. Vietnam is still communist. Russia is no longer communist, of course.

Incidentally in grammar we have spent AGES on the passive voice, which we hardly ever use. EXCEPT that this history essay was, of course, full of the passive voice. "The system was replaced", "the language was established", "a constitution was written", etc.

AND I saw the grammar lecturer today. On Wednesday I missed a test because of this cold. I explained to her what had happened. She asked if I could bring a medical certificate. I said I hadn't seen a doctor. I offered to sit the test. She pondered.

In some ways I wasn't worried what she would decide, because if you spread my two test results over the three tests, I would still pass OK.

But she said she would take the average of my results and apply that. She's a super lady.

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