Letter 2 (2018-2019) - St George, Utah

Each student of our class received a second letter from the American penfriends. On the one hand, the American students had to describe themself physically and morally, in French. For example, my penfriend Ethan said that he is tall, he has black curly hair and brown eyes; he has freckles too. He also said that he is funny. On the other hand, our penfriends described their city: St George. We learnt that St George is a small town, located in the desert, in the state of Utah. It’s a hot and sunny place with red mountains. Moreover, this is a peaceful, calm and quiet place and there are many old and nice people. For instance, Ethan wrote in his letter that St George is a place for someone to retire. He added that there aren’t many things to do for kids. However, there are still activities like skateparks and trampoline parks.
Lucie DE LA FOURNIERE, 2°A

Hello Utah! (2018-2019)

Letter 1 in French is a presentation from our American pen-friends, they are around 15 years old and they live in Saint George, Utah. They want to learn French and some of them want to be tri lingual.

The letter in English is a physical presentation and a presentation of their city. First, they tell us what they look like for us to try to find them on a picture. Then, they told us about Saint George, it’s a small town in Utah. It’s really hot there, indeed, it’s a desert. There’s also a lot of red mountains and rocks. And it never snow.

Oxhana GRAND 2A

2017-2018 in review

Click here to be updated!

Friends from Utah - 2017/2018

Snow Canyon High School, St George, Utah

Our teacher made an exchange with students from Utah in the USA. So we had a smashing time! It was a balst! We could talk with penpals trhough different means such as videos, letters... and we spoke about different topics sucha as christmas, vacations, families and global warming. We would enjoy doing it again however we would change just one thing : We would like to meet them in Utah!
What an amazing year!
Chloé, Inès, Jeanne, Lehena and Manon from 2H

We liked to talk to Americans. Interacting with people who live far away was really exciting. But we would really have liked to exchange with them on social media and not only with letters. It could have been great to have friends from Utah!
Also letters sometimes didn't arrive on time and sometimes they did not arrive at all!
Carla, Mila, Luna and Anne from 2F

All year long we excahnged letters and videos with students from Snow Canyon High school, Utah. It was a new thing for us and it was a very good opportunity for us to be better at English. Thanks to these letters we learned how they celebrate christmas, thanksgiving, the new year's eve, Easter and all the class periods. We compared our school to theirs. Each one of us chatted w speak Frenchith only one American Student which created strong relationships. What was great with the videos was that we could hear foreigners speak French. If we had to do it again we would go for it!
Yaelle, Celeste, Annabelle and Elorri from 2E.

Et les TSTL dans la presse locale (Sud-Ouest)

Les TSTL dans la presse grecque

Voyage des TSTL en Grèce

The beginning of a long journey.

Aeroport Roissy Charles de Gaulle

Let's go to Greece!

Visiting Thessaloniki

The rotonda

Greek food, yummy...

Back to school in Greece

Meet us at the lab!

Discovering our blood type

Meeting our partners in the flesh!

5th lyceum of Veria, our partners

Metera

What a great adventure!

Back home!

St Patrick's day

Saint Patrick's day

St Patrick's day is The National Day in Ireland. Irish people of all around the world celebrate the day by wearing green, the colour of Ireland, and by parading in the streets. They celebrate the patron saint of Ireland but also the christianization of the country.

St Patrick was born in Scotland. When he was 16, he was kidnapped by pirates and sold as a slave to an Irish druid. He dicovered the christian religion.

After a dream in which he saw God, he escaped from the druid to England where he became priest. His goal was to come back to Ireland to convert the Irish people. There, he built monastery, church ans schools to formed believer.

The legend says that he used the shamrock to explain the Holy Trinity to Irish. The three leaves represented the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit.

The legend of St Patrick also says that he chased all the snakes of Ireland by making them fall of a cliff. But this is a metaphor for his victory of the conversion of christianity in Ireland against the pagan faith.

Time Magazine

This week, the 12^th of March, in the Time Magazine, there an article about how Trump's Immigration Policy is spiltting families apart. The title is «  No one is safe ». First, it tells the story of Alejandro who was on his way to work just before two vehicles pulled up behide him at a stop sign. He saw plain-clothes Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents coming toward him . There was the word POLICE written on their vests. Alejandro was a little bit worried so he called his wife Maria to tell her what was happening. Contrary to him, she wasn't really worried. She knew that her husband had no criminal record and that he's been driving this road for years in California. They arrested him as he was considered as a «  fugitive alien » by the ICE because since 2006, he goes over his visa. Therefore he had to be deported in Mexico. A few days later, they allowed him to return home with an ankle bracelet to say goodbye to his family. He left two children and a pregnant wife behind him.

However, they aren't the only ones. A lot of other families in America suffered from the same situation since the election of Donald Trump. When Barack Obama was in power, he told ICE to focus on violent delinquents but Trump didn't think the same way. He send decrets to people in a powerful position which were saying that the 11 million people who were living illegally in the country were a priority for deportation. Thomas Homan, the director of Ice, even said : “If you’re in the country illegally, we’re looking for you.”

This is why there a increase of arrests of undocumented immigrants. There are some examples : a 10 years old little girl who was disabled, a sweet grandma of a Navy veteran 's family and a father who was living in America since he was 10.

In the article, there're a lot of people who defend immigrants. One of them is Luis Zayas who's the dean of the Steve Hicks School of Social Work at the University of Texas at Austin. He gives the example of some agents of ICE who are arresting people when they leave church or when they drop their children to school.

This new policy also affects the family of undocumented people like the kids. More than 4 million Americans children have at least one undocumented parent.

To return to the story of Alejandro, Maria, like her husband, is an undocumented person. Their daughters are U.S citizens. She's afraid to be deported too and to leave her children here alone or with people she doesn't trust.

In Maria and Alejandro’s neighborhood, news of his arrest went viral. Their facebook profile is used to warn people of the localization of ICE's agents.

Alejandro even said that his friends avoid to leave their home and that they buy food at night when the ICE agents are less.

To describe this situation, Maria doesn't use the word « fear » anymore but « dread ».

The CHIRLA, Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights of Los Angeles, advise undocumented parents to write a letter which say who will be in charge of their children if they are deported.

This article is also talking about the effect of the deportation of parents on the behaviour of kids like how they become depressed.

According to Laura St. John, legal director at the Florence Immigrant and Refugee Rights Project, Maria could ask for a federal waiver but it's a process which takes 10 years so it means that she has to wait in Mexico before coming back to America. But Erin Quinn, an attorney at the Immigrant Legal Resource Center in San Francisco, assure that it was impossible for Maria to go to Mexico and come back here legally.

After all, Maria stayed in the U.S and goes on with her life but when the thought of raising her kids without their father comes to her head, she has tears in her eyes. 

Time

This week, the 26th of February, in the Time Magazine, there is an article about a man, a british Doctor Lord, Robert Winston. He was on the train when a woman begun a loud conversation that last an hour later. Winston was furious and he took a picture of the woman and post it on social media. He  began to tweet about her and more than 40,000 followers received it. When the train arrived at destination, there was the press which was waiting for her and showed her what Winston wrote about her. She just said that his action was : rude. The end of the article is about studies that show where come the rudeness and how Winston should have talk to the lady face to face rather than humiliate her on social networks.

Stalingrad(2001)

This film illustrating the psychological war in parallel with the physical war,from the russian point of view in particular,with an impressive reconstruction of a ruined Stalingrad.

Stalingrad is the work of a filmmaker applied:Annaud heals the pageant,like the big scenes;we will not forget the beginning,a tribute to soldier Ryan's Spielberg,nor the air attack,the chaos and the fear distilled by an effective assembly.

But the application also pushes him to systematically alternate strong moment and hollow moment and weaknesses dominate:direction of random actors,dialogues heavily explanatory,clichés attached to caricature characters,redundant music.

Essentially,the film describes a fight between two snipers both sides.

The scenes are very striking with a well chosen music during different moments like the sad scene

with the hanging of sacha or the moment or Nikita Krushchev orders the execution of deserters.

There is also a love story between Tania and Vassili which is very interesting.

This shows a story with difficulties during a very hard period during the famous battle of Stalingrad.

We see clearly a distinction with the Nazi sniper who embodies evil and the soviet sniper who is a good persons.

To finish we can say that this film and in particular Vassili represents the heroism of the war and the combatant.

It's clearly an epic work.

American Sniper

American Sniper

 

American Sniper is an American war movie directed bye Clint Eastwood, this is a adaptation of the autobiography of the American Sniper and member of the SEAL, Kris Kyle. This film is the biggest commercial success of Clint Eastwood career.

I loved this movie because there is a lot of action and rebound, we embody a character who is very courageous and interesting.

I stongly advice this film because it is really interesting and deal with a taboo subject.

Martin Luther King Day

Martin Luther King Day is a relatively new federal holiday and there are few long standing traditions. It is seen as a day to promote equal rights for all Americans, regardless of their background. Some educational establishments mark the day by teaching their pupils or students about the work of Martin Luther King and the struggle against racial segregation and racism. In recent years, federal legislation has encouraged Americans to give some of their time on this day as volunteers in citizen action groups.
 Martin Luther King Day, also known as Martin Luther King’s birthday and Martin Luther King Jr Day, is combined with other days in different states. For example, it is combined with Civil Rights Day in Arizona and New Hampshire, while it is observed together with Human Rights Day in Idaho. It is also a day that is combined with Robert E. Lee’s birthday in some states. The day is known as Wyoming Equality Day in the state of Wyoming.

 I'm going to talk about one of the emblematic figures of the fight against segregation in the USA
On December 1, 1955, in the city of Montgomery, Alabama, Rosa Parks, who was seated in a seat reserved for whites, refuses to obey a bus driver who asks her to leave her seat and go to the seat. bottom of the vehicle. She is arrested, tried and charged with public disorder and violation of local laws, with a fine of $ 15. She fully assumes her gesture, which however was not premeditated.

"People say I refused to give up my seat because I was tired, but it's not true, I was not physically tired, or no more than usual at the end of a day. I was not old, while some give me the image of an old woman.I was 42. No, the only fatigue I had was to give in. "
Rosa Parks is appealing the judgment. NAACP lawyer Edgar Nixon, seeing the symbolic value of the fight, is asking white lawyer Clifford Durr to agree to challenge the constitutionality of the segregation law. For his part, the 26-year-old pastor Martin Luther King, with the help of African-American community leaders, is launching a non-violent protest campaign and a boycott against the Montgomery bus company, a boycott that will last 381 days. Finally, on November 13, 1956, the Supreme Court broke the segregationist laws on buses by declaring them unconstitutional.

Mathilda, Emma

Dunkirk

    The movie Dunkirk tells the story of one of the most tragic events during World War 2. In 1940,  the english, the french and the belgian troops were stook in Dunkirk surronded by the germans. During this period the english tried to escape from the beach where they were trapped. Then the english asked help to England to come over for brought them to their home and delivered them of the grip of the germans thanks to the dynamo operation which consists of crossing the boat sleeve to come and rescue the english.

    The movie show the english side and we follow the journey of some of them. This is an excellent film despite minor flaws. This movie is simply pure emotional, we can go from sadness to joy in a blink of an eye and vice versa. Moreover, this is the kind of movie that enable people aware of the horror of the war and also not to forget the hell that our world has known, that's the reasons why I liked this movie. Despite that, in my opinion, the film lacks actions but it's still a very good movie.

    Christopher Nolan has realized this film perfectly and made it a symbol among the many existing war movies. Not the mention that the actors are very talented and have been able to embody their roles as needed. This is a great movie that everybody should see, I recommand it.  

 

La Grande Vadrouille

During the occupation during the World War II, six british pilots of the Royal Air Force got their plane shot by the Germans when they were flying over Paris, 3 of them, a chief and two pilots end up meeting French people who agree to help them to meet at the "turkish bath" thanks to their code name "tea for two", a famous english song of the time. Then, through several adventures and a lot of humor, trying to join back their country helped by the conductor of an orchestra, a building painter a young woman, a holy sister, and an hotel keeper, they will show us the reality the occupied France and the relationships between this country and Great Britain.

The movie, made in 1966 , is indeniably a masterpiece. Through a very simple sense of humor, Gérard Oury manages to express a criticism of Hitler and the nazis as well as the war itself through the characters of the british. The movie is also making fun of the British by caricaturing them even in their names, Indeed, one of them is called Macintosh, they drink and talk only about tea. The movie plays also on the different opinions within the France as well as the French stereotypes especially through the characters of Stanislas (played by Louis de Funès), the pretentious conductor of an orchestra, and Augustin, the humble building painter.

However, the plot is quite repetitive and the events are predictable since the comic of the movie mainly relies on quiproquos or caricatures. Also, the story is pretty unrealistic because the caracters always manage to avoid being arrested by the Germans while it would actually never happen that way. They also always meet people willing to help them such as the holy sister ir the hotel keeper. Nevertheless, the movie is still a French classic and it's still very comic and instructive at the same time.

Saving Private Ryan

Saving Private Ryan is a 1998 war film directed by Steven Spielberg and starring Tom Hanks, Matt Damon, Edward Burns, Tom Sizemore, Vin Diesel, Barry Pepper, Jeremy Davies, Ted Danson, Paul Giamatti, and many more Hollywood men.

After the Omaha Beach invasion, General George C. Marshall receives the news that three brothers with the last name "Ryan" have all died in combat — two during the Normandy landing, the third in the Pacific — and the location of the fourth, who dropped into France as a paratrooper, is unknown. Miller receives orders to search for the fourth and last Ryan (Damon) so that Ryan can be sent home, and he quickly assembles a small squad to carry out the task.

So we follow throughout this film this group of soldiers whose mission is to save Private Ryan, to bring him back to his mother.

The film earned near-univeral praise from audiences and critics alike; it was the highest-grossing domestic film of 1998 (second-highest-grossing worldwide), and received eleven nominations in that year's Academy Awards (winning five).

Emma Deschamps 1LVA

Mathilda Blanc 1LVA

Wonder Woman

                                                            Wonder Woman

   Wonder woman is a movie of 2017 created by DC production. It's an enigmatic film that's happening in America. She was living on the island paradise when it was announced a war that was preparing on the other side of the Earth. It's the first world war. She will leave and it is like she will discover her super powers because we do not forget that Wonder Woman is a super heroine.


Everything that corresponds to his past and to Greek mythology, sheds light on the Amazons of Themyscira, the paradise island far from the world of men! This fragile and pure side, absolutely essential, gives us a different aspect of this heroine. The fact of retracing your life from start to finish is very important for those who do not know the story .

This film is very well done and I loved the decorations that are just dazzling. The music is great and generally actors have put their role in their skin ! It's a war movie that I recommend to all .

film- La folle histoire de max et leon

           The movie wich I'm going to tell you about is "La folle histoire de Max et Léon". This movie is about two men during the second world war, who don't want to go on the battlefield. So, first, both pretend they are blind but that doesn't work. As their tips to be reformed doesn't work, they are forced to go to war. Then we are going to see the adventures of two friends during the world war two. 

I really appreciate this movie because it is more original than others war film, like Pearl Harbor wich is sad contrarely to this one wich is particullary funny. We can have a good time while watching it, even if it's a war film. The other reason why I like this movie, is because their is a lot of references to movies like "La grande vadrouille", "le mur de l'Atlantique" or "saving private ryan" wich are also war movies. 

"La folle histoire de Max et Léon" has been done by two famous youtubers. Those youtubers are known by the nickname "Le Palmashow" and their real name are David Marsais and Gregoire Ludig. They wrote the script and they are also the main characters of the movie, David as Max and Gregoire as Léon. As they are youtubers a lot of people were not sur about the quality of the movie, meanwhile it has been well received by the critics. As David and Gregoire are really followed on youtube (nearly 3millions followers) and as they are many young peoples who watch their videos, and certainly want to watch the film, the bloody, violent side of the war is really light. 

Au revoir là-haut

This film is the adaptation of the novel of Pierre Lemaître, a french writter who won the "Prix Goncourt" with the book "Au revoir là-haut". In this film, directed by Marc Dupontel (who play the main character too) and the scenario is realised by Marc Dupontel and Pierre Lemaître himself, we see the amazing story of two french soldiers after the war, who are trying to go from rags to riches.

I know it's unusual, but I will start with the ending, which is the imperfection of the film. Indeed, the final scene, after many sudden developments, shows a flimsy "happy-ending": the three protagonists are making a hug and looks very happy, even if one has seen a suicide and the other lost his best friend.

But this is the only minor flaw of the film.The film strenghs lie in two things: the plot and the actors. First, we clearly see the difference between the plot's writer and the "Hollywood" plot. There is always one detail of the narration which serves to surprise the spectator. Every element of the story is use to catch the attention. The plot is splendid. The actors are touching because they feel natural. They are not trying to make us cry, they are human, it never sinks into sentiment. They seem taken by the plot, and we are living the story with them. Both are bringing simply pure emotional power. We can say it's a masterpiece because there is nothing to throw.

Inglourious Basterds by Quentin Tarantino

   This movie was directed by the famous Quentin Tarantino in 2009. This is the story of the WW2, through the journey of Shosanna Dreyfus, a young jewish girl, persecuted by the SS Colonel Hans Landa who has executed her family.
In parallel it’s the story of a group of American Jewish soldiers named “Bastards” who will try to eliminate important personalities of the Nazi regime.
These two stories will meet to form one.

    The film is excellent despite some minor flaws.

To begin with, Inglorious Basterds is believable and powerful because the plot is based on a real life situation.

The subject of the WW2 may seem repetitive because there are many films on it, but it's worth it to see this one.

The film’s strenght relies on its casting with the presence of famous actors such as Christopher Waltz, Brad Pitt and Mélanie Laurent who bring a remarkable touch, their acting is splendid! However, sometimes, I find the play of Brad Pitt a little bit exaggerated.

    Moreover, this action and war movie is at the same time moving and harrowing. It’s simply emotional power. From my point of view, Tarantino handles this change of registry perfectly. Be careful if you can’t bear to see violence and blood on the screen, because this film is the spitting image of Tarantino!

Musics of Enio Morricone give rhythm to the movie with spectacular landscapes and shots.

The 30 minutes of the beginning are really intense and other scenes too, however apart from these few scenes, the dialogue sometimes seems boring and long...

    Finally, I think it’s a real success. The style "Tarantino" is very quickly identifiable, it’s unique, violent, intelligent, charming while standing out of his other films. As in kill Bill and Pulp Fiction, he perfectly doses each element.  This movie isn’t only for the fans of Tarantino, it’s for people who like intenses stories.