Now what in the fresh hell is your « Agrégation » thing that takes a lot of my time?

The agrégation is a competitive exam for teachers (and future teachers). Civil servant teachers (there are non-civil servant teachers too) can be one of two things:
  1. Certifiée (ou certifié pour les hommes), has to give classes for 18h a week
  2. Agrégée (ou agrégé pour les hommes), has to give classes for 15h a week, gains more than a certified teacher

Wait what?

Yup, that’s right. Because originally, agrégés teachers are supposed to teach in CPGE (Classes Préparatoires aux Grandes Écoles, think college but more elitist), which are harder to prepare classes for. So in exchange, they get to teach less hours.

Sounds interesting, I’m in

Hold on friend, before passing the exam, you must first take it (duh). There are 2 tests:
  1. a written part, itself in 2 tests:
    1. 6 hours on calculus
    2. 6 hours on “general mathematics”, which is linear algebra
  2. if you have a good enough grade on the written part (about 8.5/20), you get to take the oral part, itself in 2 parts:
    1. lesson exam, in which you have 3 hours to prepare a lesson (with proofs and all) on a randomly picked subject, and you have to defend it for about 50 minutes (15 minutes during which you present your lesson plan, 15 minutes during which you develop further one part of your lesson plan, and 30 minutes of questions from the jury) ;
    2. exercises exam, in which you have 3 hours to prepare exercises about a randomly picked subject, and have to defend it for about 50 minutes (10 minutes of presenting the exercises, 15 minutes to solve one, and 35 minutes of questions from the jury
Oh btw, it’s a competitive exam. There are usually about 160 places each year, for about 1600 candidates. Yup.

Sounds hard. How long do you have to study?

That’s the neat part: mathematics rarely evolve in a retconning way, the material is the same year over year (modulus some minor changes). Usually it takes 5 years of study to pass it. I’m on my technically 3rd year, effectively 2nd year, and in practice I’m slowly starting studying for it on my own time this year. So I have still a couple of years before passing the written part, and then some for the oral part.