Lab RANT

Time to celebrate the end of all labs for the semester! This week's had a rough beginning, as I've had two physiology labs (or TP for "travaux pratiques", they call it here) covering two afternoons already. The lab session that I have on Tuesdays is probably the worst I've ever endured. It's just terrible because the report is due at the end of the session and I always end up with gravely retarded lab partners. We have to hand in the lab report as a pair so not only do I have to worry about the parts I write, I also have to drag the other person along with me. Last time, I'm sure my lab partner was on some powerful painkillers and after escaping from him this time, I was paired with a girl who writes the most senseless things. The level that people aim for over here just seems so much lower than what I'm used to at McGill. No suprise though, here's what I recently learned.

Post-secondary schools in France are categorized as "les grandes écoles'' and "les universités". Students who do better go to the first kind of schools, which are usually private and very selective. On the other hand, the universities accept anyone who apply. I knew beforehand that Pierre et Marie Curie was the best university in France, which is part of the reason I applied here, but turns out it's only the best of the worst and there's a whole untapped realm out there! It sucks for students over here because alrealdy in their early twenties, they have to deal with the weight of a division between classes ie. the intellectuals vs commoners.

Back to the subject of my physiology lab on Tuesday. We were supposed to study the action potential on a frog's nerve. I didn't expect the sample to be simply given to us but I was also not prepared for what followed. Without even a warning, the TA's brought in live breathing frogs in glass jars (we're talking huge ass toads too), took them out one by one and repeatedly planted a sharp rod into their brains to "desensitize their central nervous system." It was disgusting and inhumane. I know they kill rats in laboratory all the time by decapitation but I just couldn't bear this one. And what's worse, they don't provide gloves for the dissection and we had to gut the poor frog with our bare fingers and nails! I also recently fond out from a friend in Chemistry that they don't use glove to handle organic reagents. I really can't understand the principle behind that.