Respecting Cultural Differences vs. Universal Disrespect

Very early on during my time here in France, I mentioned that one of the things that annoyed me most was that we rarely get out of class on time. For the last seven school days, we've been having two classes per day, scheduled from 9-12 and 2-5, with a two-hour lunch break in between. Of those seven days, I don't think there has been one in which at least one class did not run over by 15 minutes or more. In fact, out of those 14 class sessions, I would venture to guess that 10 lasted longer than they were supposed to. Sometimes class runs over because the professor has just one or two more slides that he or she needs to cover, or because four different classmates have "one last point" to make. One day, we ran over by 30 minutes due to "short" group presentations lasting for between 45 minutes and an hour.

A similar issue arises when it comes to starting things on time. Typically, professors are pretty good at starting promptly at 9 or 2, depending on the class. But there are a couple students who always come in 20-30 minutes late each day, and it doesn't seem to bother the professors one bit. They just greet them and continue with the lecture. Group work can also be a challenge in terms of timing, as I discovered last week. I had planned to work with my group for one of our class assignments last Sunday. I was to meet one of my teammates at 11 a.m. near one of the tram stops, and we would walk to our other teammate's apartment from there. I showed up at 11:00, and no one else did. I waited 5 minutes, and then sent text messages to both of my team members, and while one didn't respond at all (later discovered that her phone had been having problems with text messages) I didn't receive a response from my other teammate for another 10 minutes. The message said that she was getting ready to leave and would be there in 10 minutes. She arrived about 30 minutes later. By the time we got to our other teammate's apartment, it was close to noon, and that was a full hour wasted.

To me, this comes across as a complete lack of respect for others' time. If you are scheduled to meet at a certain time for 2 hours or 3 hours, I expect that that time commitment will be honored, or to at least let me know that you're running late. However, that is almost never the case here. I also realize, though, that this could be a self-reference bias. That is, I expect that things should be the same for me here (or anywhere) as they are in the States, whereas, the culture in France (and the home countries of many of my classmates, apparently) is simply not as concerned with being on time. I really am trying my best to adjust, but I also wonder if, because Audencia is an International MBA program that is trying to prepare its students for international jobs (and a push seems to be on helping students find work in the US), then shouldn't punctuality be addressed and taught as being important? Maybe not-- It's just a question that I'm really not sure of.

As long as we're on the subject, how appropriate is it to carry on side conversations in the middle of someone else's presentation? This has also been happening since I got here, but has gotten worse lately as we've been doing more and more presentations in our classes. No matter who is presenting (it can even be the professor), there is almost always another conversation taking place between two or more students somewhere in the room. Now, I have no problem with students who are asking someone else what a particular English word means if they are unclear, but what I'm referring to are the 5-minute, normal-volume-voice conversations that my classmates often have with each other, and seem to think nothing of it. Again, OSU (and probably any American) professors would have a fit if students were talking to each other instead of paying attention, but again, professors here just go on as if nothing is happening. Is this another cultural difference that I'm simply unaware of, or is it a disrespectful act? I'm just not sure.

I'm leaving France in less than 6 weeks, and I'm obviously never going to tell everyone to show up on time and keep quiet when others are talking, but I do wonder if it's something worth mentioning casually, especially to those students who want to work in the USA someday.

Any insights?