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If it were up to me, reader, there would be no such thing as grades. I see where honors like “distinction” or, well, “honors” can be valuable, and can reward exceptional talent or skill, but regular-term grades? Nonsense. Useless nonsense.
Now, Brit Uni’s system is by far the worst I’ve ever encountered.
Bullshit item #1: Term papers are submitted “anonymously” to two “anonymous” examiners. Anonymous? My ass. One examiner is the tutor for the course, the other can only be one of two people currently teaching in my department, in my period. The course tutor will know which paper is mine, because, um, s/he helped me to develop it. Hello. And there aren’t that many students on my M.A. In one case, there were only two of us in the class, and our styles are totally different. It will be easy to tell which paper belongs to whom. Aside from “anonymous” commentary sent back through official channels, examiners (and thus tutors) are not officially allowed to discuss a student’s work with her. [!!!!!!!!!!!!!!]
Bullshit item #2: The earliest (earliest) possible return date for marks and commentary is one month into the new term. Which is only two months long. Most students tell stories of having gotten their marks only at the end of the following term, and of never having gotten any comments at all. Now, how is this supposed to be useful? (Again. Very few students on this M.A. If my undergrad profs could turn around twenty or more twenty-page papers in a week, surely these folks can handle less than ten in a month?) At the risk of sounding like a snowflake, how the hell am I supposed to learn from last term’s experience if I don’t get feedback, or if I don’t get it in time to implement it in the next round of papers?
Bullshit item #3: These papers are treated more or less as unseen exams, with access to books. Faculty are not allowed to read drafts of their students’ papers, or to give feedback on anything more substantive than a “plan.” Students are not, in fact, allowed to have their drafts read by anyone who is not an official Uni writing-center worker. If one of my tutors or one of my classmates reads a draft of my paper, it is said to give me an “advantage.” Um, well. Yes. That’s correct. It would be pretty bloody fucking advantageous if I could have a conversation with my mentors and my cohort about my work. I might even, well, learn something. And write a better paper! Please explain to me what’s unfair about that.
The system, I’m guessing, was designed in part to protect students from faculty bias, and in part (mostly) to protect faculty from grade-grubbing students, and to reduce in general the risk of litigiousness that comes with any assessment arrangement. (The whole problem would be solved with many fewer person-hours and a lot less money and paper if you did away with grades entirely. Ahem.) I’m all for protection, and grub-prevention, but I think this is extreme.
The other side of that coin is that this not only impedes a student’s learning process, it also impairs her ability to develop a close relationship with her mentors through work. It forces her to operate more or less in a void. Worst of all, it puts the entire emphasis on product, and none at all on process. I couldn’t give two shits about grades, as long as they’re not awful enough to hurt me later. What I care very, very deeply about is… well, learning. Is that so ridiculous? What shows up on my transcript is so astonishingly much less valuable to me than even a half-hour’s conversation with one of my teachers. If that conversation could, just once, be about my written work, it would teach me more than I will ever learn from the number spat out by a big, unwieldy, “anonymous” bureaucratic assessment-machine.
This goes back to something that never ceases to bother me: the academy is a community, not a machine. Yet institutions, especially big ones, so often refuse to recognize that. A university should be based on human relationships, to the greatest extent possible. That sounds so idealistic. But really? All I want is to hand my work directly to the person who fostered it, and have her hand it directly back to me, with her near-illegible scribbled marginalia decorating it. That is human. It’s also, apparently, too much to ask.
I left the house this morning at 6:30 wearing tons of clothes and carrying a mugful of coffee since I don’t have a go-cup.
I waited for two and a half hours in the twenty-degree air outside the préfecture. I smoked a whole bunch of cigarettes, read Céline, listened to the laughter and ranting around me. Once inside, I had several outbursts. I got what I wanted and left, lighthearted and delirious with the joy of being done, done, done with immigration bureaucracy. I knocked on wood the moment I sat down at a café. The waiter, amused, filled my own funny green mug with the most delicious café crème I’ve ever imbibed. I read some more Céline. I counted the number of passers-by I found “attractive enough” (approx. 8.5). I studied the whirly velour upholstery of the chair across from me. Céline made me laugh.
I went baby-clothes shopping. I went into Hermès looking like a homeless person wearing all that clothing and my hair all floppy from my bureaucratic morning and smelling of cigarettes and the stares I got and the sneer of the doorman drove me straight out again. (Too bad for my mum, who’d have got a scarf otherwise.)
I went home and took a nap.
Then I talked to my (scarfless) mum.
– Antonio’s brain cancer is worse; he’s dying quickly. He’s 48. Patty married him after two disastrous, abusive marriages because he, after a lonely life, couldn’t stand not to marry the woman he worshipped. They adore each other, wildly. They got married in Vegas. He’s changed Patty’s life. They were happy. One year after their marriage, brain tumor. Radiation, chemo, he did all right. One year after that, Antonio suddenly grows an enormous, inoperable tumor. It’s Christmas and Antonio, who’s 48 and the love of Patty’s life, is going to die.
– Powerful, laughterful Debbie who recovered from brain tumors and seeming-happily renewed her vows with her seeming-splendid husband this summer filed for divorce on Thursday because the bastard’s been beating the shit out of her for years.
– The ex-parent of the two (more) golden retrievers Jeff’s adopted is a three-time breast cancer survivor. She finally got married to a wonderful man. She warned him that her health was chancy at best. He married her because he loved her. They had two golden retrievers. Then he dropped dead of an aneurism.
– Reflection: in the past month, my father’s estranged sister Jean died of an illness none of us knew about, and our very close Uncle Lou died of being 98 years old. Jean’s face was pockmarked. Uncle Lou drove small me around in his red-leather-upholstered Cadillac and knew about Shakespeare.
I told my mom about the préfecture to cheer us up. We laughed, we said I love you, we hung up.
I went out for more Christmas presents. I listened to the Nields and skipped happily across the Pont Neuf. The holiday decorations throughout the city are gaudy but warm, some are beautiful. The illustrated edition of Voyage au bout de la nuit that I wanted to get for Chris turned out to be hideous and cartoony. I flirted happily with the bookseller girl about it. I ate a pain au chocolat.
(This is a kind of delirium. A kind of insanity, a psychic disjuncture or a happy schizophrenia that I’ve caught over here.)
I wandered through the quartier des antiquaires and stumbled onto the place in front of St Etienne, where I’d just been, leaving the préfecture. I was struck. I went inside. It’s one of the most beautiful churches I’ve ever seen. Awe struck me into a pew to… kneel. I don’t know how to pray. So for the first time ever I lit a candle and for the first time since I was thirteen and went to Mass with my Nonna, I crossed myself and whispered something about healing and injustice and care for the weak. I don’t know how to pray and it came out as an angry hiss and by the look on her face the Virgin took it badly.
Suddenly I felt wretched and turned and all but ran back out into the sun.
Antonio is Catholic. I lit the candle for him.
I bought gloves for myself and for Lucile, and hilarious music boxes that play the Marseillaise for miscellaneous folks and failed for my parents and failed for others, too. So I paid way too much and in euros at that for a gorgeous dress which I have no occasion to wear but I look divine and a little diabolical too in that dress so I bought it, and besides it goes with my boots and maybe I should have a New Year’s party.
I bought some beers and came home and smoked some cigarettes and put on Tori Amos live and ate a yogurt.
I’m a legal resident of the Republic of France. Antonio is dying. I live a spectacular, almost-adventurous Life Abroad. Antonio is dying and Lou is dead and Jean disappeared one day and never came back. I look spectacular in that dress. Antonio is dying. Somebody on the radio is reading Verlaine to a hip-hop beat and I’m almost done with my beer; the phone is ringing and Antonio is dying. Lou is dead and Debbie’s husband beats the living shit out of her, and the vaults of St Etienne are so striking, and the tapestries, and the disrepair, but I don’t know how to pray. There was a choir practicing in the basement and the soprano just reached me as I stood in the nave gaping and trying to remember how to pray.
Lucile is cooking dinner and lighting candles. Cold and the smell of woodsmoke drift in through the open window.
Last Thursday afternoon, at recess, I sat down in the sun on a bench next to Fanny, one of my youngest colleagues. She looked at me sympathetically – all the teachers at my afternoon school worry about me because my CM1’s are so evil – and said “Ça va?” with knowing kindness and a doubtful raised eyebrow. I shrugged and sighed, “oh… oui, de plus en plus… oui, ça va.”
I had just given a quiz to my CM1’s. It took them the whole class period whereas my morning classes took only twenty minutes. I gave four of them (out of twenty) zeros for talking or looking at each other’s papers during the quiz. I had threatened the same to all of my other classes – I don’t want to be a hardass, but come on, cheating? – but no one had yet given me reason to enforce. I gave four zeros, then spent half of my precious recess drying the shamed tears of the kids who earned them. My throat hurt from repeating quiz directions and giving dictations all day. I was sighingly tired, as I always am at the end of my Thursdays, during recess before my last class.
Fanny – who’s probably not much older than me but has a careworn look about her that can only come from time spent wearing the vexed, befuddled, exasperated grimace common to all institutrices – shook her head, rifling a bunch of papers stamped with the letterhead of the Académie de Toulouse (as requisite for une instit’ as that grimace). “C’est vachement dur… et ils sont terribles.” Ah, ben, oui, je le sais bien. “Non, mais c’est dur, ce que tu fais, là, tu te rends compte? Tu interviens, comme ça, ils savent que tu vas partir dans une heure, que tu n’es pas la maîtresse, que tu n’as pas autant de pouvoir, ils le savent, et toi tu n’as pas d’opportunité de t’imposer, et pas de soutiens structurels en plus – oh, oui, c’est dur.”
That was the nicest thing anyone had yet said to me about my job. It’s hard. Sometimes, it’s just bloody hard. The sincerity of Fanny’s sympathy, while not something terribly useful, is part of what little I love about l’Éducation Nationale. The madness of teachers’ lives here binds them all together in a kind of staid, grittily determined – if painfully pessimistic – solidarity. I don’t think of my directrices or of my colleagues as my superiors, even though strictly speaking they’re perched a little higher than I am in the hierarchy (see below). No one has ever tried to pull a power trip on me, no one gives me orders, no one asks anything of me that is not clearly laid out in my contract.
When I told a directrice at another school that I would have to miss a day, but that I would make it up, she told me that as long as I didn’t tell the Inspection, neither would she, and I would still get paid as though I had been there. While my instinct is to chalk that up to the same impulse of socialism-gone-awry that causes stagnation and despair and malfunctions in so many aspects of French life, I also find something lovely in the automatic, immediate care of one teacher for another. We’re all screwed by national education, by the ministère, by our irreconcilable but nevertheless simultaneous places at the bottom of an impenetrable bureaucratic hierarchy and at the center of French children’s educational experiences, and so we take care of each other.
I sighed and smiled at Fanny and said, “Merci, c’est gentil.” She sighed and smiled at me and with one hand untied the knots in a little girl’s shoelaces while with the other hand she signed and dated her way through her stack of papers.
This hangs in the teachers’ lounge of one of my schools (my favorite). The emblem of what the maîtresses, and now I, make of the Education Nationale:
The text, roughly translated, reads: “Let the shat-on at the bottom reassure themselves that, raising their eyes, they will see nothing but a bunch of assholes.”
Yesterday, I visited the French Consulate. Ordinarily – that is, for ordinary people, with ordinary senses of humor – this would be a frustrating experience. I, with my quirks and my quirky sense of humor, was deeply amused, in a nostalgic-for-impenetrable-bureaucratic-systems-à-la-française sort of way. First, they force you to make an appointment to wait in line for an hour, whereas previously they just made you wait in line for an hour. Even before that, you have to wait outside to be called in. There is nowhere to sit outside, and very little shade. I’m sure the Consulate’s budget could absorb the cost of a bench. But that’s not the French Way. The French Way is to make all Foreigners Just A Little Uncomfortable At All Times.
Once inside, you pay the Cashier. Yesterday, this position was occupied by a bumbly but pretty young woman who thought my occupation (“intern”), was “doctor,” and stapled my application slightly incorrectly, prompting her supervisor to yell (in the French Way), “Non, non, non, non! Jamais, on ne fait cela! Jamais!”
I did not pay the Cashier, because I am employed by the French government. This caused all of the consular functionaries to treat me Very Nicely.
One item that particularly delighted me was a small alcove near the visa windows. Somebody had stowed some unneeded cordon in front of it, so that it looked like an ill-looked-after shrine. In this alcove hangs a photograph of His Illustriousness, Jacques Chirac, Président de la République Française. While charming, in a French sort of Way, he does not cut the impressive, respect-commanding figure one generally demands of the object of a (however dilapidated) national shrine:
More on His Jacquesness later.
However amused I was by the scene around me – the unnecessary bustle of unnecessarily complicated bureaucratic maneuvers being executed by unnecesarily frazzled consular functionaries – I couldn’t shake off the Evil, Greasy Feeling of the politics of the visa.
Once past the Cashier (where, if you’re staying a long time and not a government employee, you pay 125 non-refundable dollars), you stand in another line where you are confronted with (unnecessarily omnipresent) signage reading: “Les visas pour la France ne sont pas un droit!” (Visas for France are not a right.) In other words, “Be pleasant – and preferably white – with us, or we will not let your stinky self into our Beautiful Fatherland.”
Two men, perhaps in their late thirties, and only these two men, were given a hard time. They were the only two non-white, non-East-Asian people there. They were both wearing the much-feared Traditional African Garb. They both spoke – perfectly clear, comprehensible, grammatical – French with the much-feared Ambiguously African Accent. They were very dark-skinned. They both had a surfeit of papers – things they didn’t even need, like letters from their American employers, credit reports, letters from doctors affirming their good health. One was going to Paris for the month of November to stay with his family. The other was passing through Paris for three nights en route to Senegal. The first carried a Malian passport, the second a Senegalese passport.
I paused in my observations to explain to the rather stupid-looking white girl behind me, and her endlessly complaining Rich WASPy Mother, that we should be eternally grateful that we carry American passports. Rich WASPy Mother harrumphed.
The Malian man was the first of the two Fearsome African Gents to be processed. He had the misfortune of being called to the window manned by a big, white meathead in a pink Polo shirt with the collar popped. Big White Meathead (BWM) sneered as the Malian man approched his window. The Malian man presented all of his documentation – his carefully filled-out visa application, his many letters, his health insurance card, and so on. BWM sneered, covered the microphone with his hand, and turned to say something sneeringly to his superior. His superior (we’ll call him Affable French Fellow, or AFF, as he will appear again later) shot him a dirty look and made an “easy there” gesture with both hands. BWM shrugged and turned back to his microphone, asking the Malian man for another document. The Malian man dropped his hands to his sides and threw his head back in dismay. He did not have this document (the French name for which I did not understand, and sounded obscure and superfluous). He shook off his dismay and asked BWM, rather politely, why this document was necessary and why it was not listed on the Consulate’s website. BWM – I swear to God – pointed to one of the many “Visas are not a right!” signs, and asked for the document again. The Malian man shook his head in disbelief. I don’t have that one, I’m sorry, he said in French. BWM said he would have to come back with the document in order to finish his visa process. The Malian man got very upset at this point, and raised his voice, proclaiming the injustice of BWM’s demand. BWM told him, sneering, that the Consulate would keep his file open and he need only return with the proper document. He shut off his microphone and walked away. The Malian fellow yelled a plaintive but angry request that his application be processed immediately. Affable French Fellow turned away, shamed, as the Malian fellow looked to the rest of us for support. I started to smile at him, then lowered my eyes, also ashamed, wanting to hide my American passport. Rich WASPy Mother rolled her eyes and turned to whisper something to her daughter. The Malian fellow left, muttering curses against the French under his breath.
A similar scene ensued for the Senegalese fellow, who also had the misfortune of dealing with BWM, but did not put up quite the fight that his predecessor had. Having watched those dealings, when BWM asked him for a similarly obscure document, he just shrugged, sighed, and said, “D’accord, je reviendrai,” and left.
I was called up next, by Affable French Fellow. I gave him a cheery, smiley “Bonjour, M’sieu!” with my documents. He looked at my American passport and smiled. “Bonjour, Mademoieselle!” He asked for each of my papers in turn, stamped them, smiled, and told me to come back later that afternoon to pick up my passport plus visa. It took approximately five minutes. “Bonne journée, Mademoimeselle!” “Bonne journée à vous, M’sieu!”
Rich WASPy Mother shot me a dirty look.
I returned at three o’clock (it takes, apparently, approximately four hours to put a sticker on a page of a passport). AFF was again at the window. He called me up first. “Bonjour, Mademoiselle!” “Bonjour, M’sieu!” He talked me carefully and smilingly through the process of obtaining a carte de séjour upon my arrival in France – a process I already understood perfectly well. I smiled and nodded. “Oui, m’sieu, je comprends parfaitement.” He smiled in a very Paternal French Way, passed me my visa, and said cheerily, “Et, mademoiselle, la République Française vous souhaite un tres joyeux anniversaire!” I laughed, “Merci, m’sieu, à vous et à la République. Bonne journée!” “Bonne journée à vous, Mademoiselle!”
And that was that. I can travel anywhere I please. Two young African men cannot. As simple as that.
Young Americans (particularly those of the leftist persuasion) are encouraged to expatriate, at least for a while. As I noted below, it is part of our right as privileged recent college graduates to leave our home nations behind and travel the world, see what there is to be seen (gaze long and hard at it all), meet whom we please to meet, study what we please to study, and so on.
Something tells me that for these two young African men, expatriacy means nothing more than a constant longing for home, accompanied by an endless string of disappointing bureaucratic experiences. They’re not allowed to gaze at us. We ask them to turn down their eyes and submit further documented proof of their legitimacy as human beings. And then we visit their countries and weep over their starving compatriots.
I grip my American passport with its French visa hard in both hands and remind myself not to forget, not to stop thinking about this simple fact: the République rejects them (got rid of all those colonies, after all, for a reason), and wishes me a very happy birthday.
