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… Ah.
Servetus was right (telepathically?).
I don’t know how many times I’ve said over the past year that I am blessed in my mentors. I say it again: I am blessed in my mentors.
[There is more than one reason - each vaguely disturbing in its own way - for my continued tendency to talk about my academic work in religious terms. Fodder for a further post.]
This morning’s meeting reminded me to feel blessed, and to hold carefully in mind what that blessing is and how it works.
Thus: a good mentor does not only hold his student’s hand. He faces her bluntly and directly with her task, presents to her the scrambled machinery of her project and asks her, plainly, to make it go. Because she trusts him, because she knows that he is there to teach her and that she has no choice but to learn, she places her delicate (if clumsy), loving (if careless) fingers on the gears and the wires and the ticky thing she doesn’t quite know what to do with, and she fumbles (sometimes gracefully, more often not) until it starts to clack and whirr.
When smoke starts pouring out, her teacher is there with his swift sense to stop the sparks and isolate the problem. Sheepishly, she turns the ticky thing the other way and the whole mess stops clacking and settles into a gentle frrrruummm.
Grace is too much to ask.
Deft mechanics is a better start.
(The next step: Okay. It works. But what does it do?)
Most academic conversations about teaching are entirely centered on pedagogy this, classroom management that, course design the other thing. Occasionally the traits of a gifted rhetorician are acknowledged – sense of humor and adaptability primary among them. The image that emerges is of a Teacher divorced from time and space, and especially from body — an ideal emblem, or perhaps a set of templates.
Sometimes teachers conform eerily to that abstract emblem or those templates. We encounter Inspiring Teacher Movie types in real life. Or as in the case of one of my mentors, we get pure, streamlined pedagogy and cold critique hauntingly detached from the rest of the universe.
But much more often, what makes a perfectly ordinary teaching moment inspiring or delightful or compelling is a very basic trait, or an amalgam of very basic traits, that has nothing to do with pedagogy per se.
One of my professors here at Brit Uni — we’ll call him the Heretic — shows up every week with absolutely no sign that he’s prepared anything at all for the class. He brings no notes, most times no books. He sits down, takes a deep breath, plants his hands on the table and says, “Right.” And then we just start looking at whatever old volume is sitting in front of us, floating ideas into the ether until something catches. Then it gets animated. Just like any other conversation.
I learn a great deal from those conversations — it must be said, the Heretic is horribly erudite and he carries his erudition well. He’s also very critically savvy, and as heretical in his approaches to the study of literature as are the subjects of his research in their approaches to theology. An intellectual delight.
But sometimes the things I learn from him have nothing at all to do with that. The mechanical things I take notes on and the more transcendent things I am learning have very little in common.
Yesterday I noticed for the first time that the Heretic has an extraordinarily lovely voice, and that he reads aloud beautifully. He read to us from Florio’s Montaigne, a particular bit I had deemed on first glance irredeemably insane. But steeped in the rich modulations of the Heretic’s voice, it gathered sense and beauty. I suddenly understood it. I could not have experienced those words the way I did yesterday morning except through the totally incidental fact of my teacher’s voice.
This has happened before — Fierce Emerita at the Petri Dish had an incantatory way of reading aloud that drew me into the beauty of poems I was eager to cast aside. She spoke in long, wild sentences whose syntax was nevertheless always impeccably intact. You could hear her semi-colons and parentheses. The notes I took in her classes were maps of her sentences, some of which ran to more than a page. There is little that I can listen to for two hours without tiring, but the long, slow sentences of Fierce Emerita, in her soft, wise voice, those I often felt I could just move into and inhabit forever.
It can’t be taught or learned. It may be a matter of taste — some might find Heretic’s reading noisome or Emerita’s speech convoluted. But a trait like voice is sometimes the catalyst that brings a student closer to her mentor, or draws her round to a new vision, or simply refreshes her.
Perhaps another way of looking at it would be to say that, after all, there’s as much metaphysics to the classroom as there is metrics. My hope in fact is that there’s more.
My problem, in most things in life, is that I have a selective memory. Pain tends to get washed out. Really. I have very few painful memories. This means that I look back on my time teaching primary school English in France with a great deal of joy and nostalgia.
This revisionism is abetted by the little missives I keep getting from my students. A few days ago, this one arrived, from ten-year-old Anaïs, one of my absolute favorites. She is mature, thoughtful, and mind-blowingly talented. And she wrote to me in English:
“Hello, [Neophyte], I’m Anaïs, a girl from les Auques School. I enjoyed a lot my holydays in Canada. It was very cold but I liked alot this country and I visited a lot of things. I hoped you had a good travel to come backe in your family. I hope your are very well. I don’t like my new english teacher, I don’t learn any thing with her. I send you a lot of kisses.”
The French syntax and idioms reveal direct translation, with the help of a dictionary and perhaps an adult. This is, nevertheless, beyond remarkable. She took the time to explore and to experiment. She catches faults, scratches them out and corrects them. She tackles complex formations that she could easily have avoided. The past tense, ladies and gentlemen of the jury! And best of all for mouse here, she wanted to share that experimentation with me. I take absolutely no credit for its quality. I am only deeply proud of Anaïs, joyful at her thoughtfulness, and optimistic about her prospects. At the moment, France, and especially its “desert” post-industrial towns like Mazamet, is a depressing and frightening place to be young. I gave my students a speech on the last day about how they must promise me to continue with their English, not to balk at its difficulty or give in to frustration, at all costs, continue with English, because fluent English would be the key that would open any door for them. For Anaïs and a few others, this will come true. That, reader, makes the heart of the little educator in me positively sing.
1) You will recall, perhaps, my post below about Axel, my wild little CE2, and how I’d developed a system with him in which I ask him for five minutes of calm, and then five more. By the beginning of this trimester, we’d worked our way up to fifteen minutes at a time. On Monday, the first thing he said when he came into my classroom was, “Aujourd’hui je serai sage pour toute l’heure!” I was so deeply proud of him, of the pride on his own face. And he was, très sage. He had trouble focusing, paying attention, and wasn’t as eager to participate as usual, but he didn’t disturb the class even once. I realized I’d defined “calm” rather poorly, but we had a chat about it at the end of the class, and he agreed that the next step would be to try to be calm and pay attention at the same time. I can’t begin to describe my joy at the eager smile on his diabolical little face.
2) I’ve had a lot of trouble convincing my CM2’s of the value of taking notes, of understanding that when I write something on the board, I’m not just doing it to entertain myself, and that they shouldn’t wait for my cue to take out a piece of paper and write down whatever we’re learning. I find myself echoing my own fifth-grade teachers, reminding the kids that they’ll be in middle school next year and no one’s going to want to hold their hands and tell them when it’s time to take notes. On Monday, Nyveen, who’s a little bit slow and a lot rowdy and takes every opportunity to test my authority, but who’s nevertheless one of my favorite students, listened patiently to my lecture about note-taking. At the end of the class, she grabbed my sleeve as I passed on the way out, and showed me her notebook — she had carefully noted everything I’d said, even casual remarks about similarities and differences between English and French that I didn’t expect any of them to remember, had produced a written record of every class since the break. I smiled approvingly and complimented her on good work, and told her that the next step would be to study those notes on a regular basis. She smiled back — “Mais j’ai fait! Je les ai étudiées!” — and recited some of it for me as proof.
3) Again, on Monday (a day of tiny triumphs), an unusual occurrence in another class of CM2’s. Clément, who usually needs a question or an activity explained a few times before he can respond or participate, and gets miserably disheartened when he gives an incorrect answer, raised his hand with his usual slightly befuddled but determined expression. “Est-ce qu’on va faire la conjugaison aujourd’hui?” Yes, we’d be going over that nasty present tense of “to be” that we’d learned the previous week. I made a little chart on the board, and before I could ask for the first person singular, Clément’s hand was up. Slowly, scrunching up his mouth and studying the ceiling, he said confidently, and somewhat miraculously, “I yam, you awwe, ‘e iss, shay iss, we awwe, they awwe.” Again, that smile, that pride.
Remembering all of this helps. So does taking deep breaths. I think about these moments, I take a deep breath, and the anxiety about tomorrow disappears for a moment. It returns, sure enough, and then I stave it off again. Little steps, and little comforts.
As I lounge in my living room surrounded by half-made bingo games and markers and half-graded stacks of papers and nauseatingly cheery books on primary education, I mull over the critique of the Education Nationale that’s been building in my bewildered brain since my first trip to Mazamet’s Inspection in late September. I’m also trying to work out a lesson plan for my second group of CE2’s that will incorporate some of wild little Axel’s energy so that I don’t have to yell at him any more.
I am opposed to the overdiagnosis of these things in the States, but Axel is the clearest case of ADHD, or something closely resembling it, that I’ve ever encountered. He is incapable of sitting still for more than two minutes together. He can’t stop talking – at his most “well-behaved,” he mumbles along, repeating whatever I’m saying, and at his most “ill-behaved” he shouts at his classmates when they respond incorrectly to questions, or yells out whatever’s just been written on the board – or anything else that comes into his head, for that matter. He can’t give an answer without standing up and fidgeting, and if he gets it right he has to do a little dance and sing or maybe rap for a moment. If he doesn’t have something in his hands, he drums incessantly – and loudly – on his table-top. For all that, he’s one of the best English-learners I have. But there are no structures in place at his school to help him learn, no counselor or special education teacher to give him some individual attention. His teachers think he’s just a pain in the ass (and he can be), wilfully disobedient, a problem. They have been trained to believe that all students must fit a single mold of “obedience.” All students must learn at the same pace, in the same manner, with the same study habits and classroom comportment, right down to the uniform French handwriting rigorously imposed on them from a young age.
Axel’s teachers are unwilling to break their molds to help him, and I am entirely unequipped to do so. He disrupts my class, but I can’t stick him with the standard punishment – sending him to the directrice for scolding – because I don’t believe that it’s his fault if he feels the need to act out against a system that wants to turn him into an automaton. But I also can’t allow his antics to interrupt the learning of his classmates. So I am trying to build my lesson plans around him. I just don’t know how.
In my university classes in Paris three years ago I got a glimpse of the way French children are formed by the French education system. The students took notes in at least two colors (black or blue for writing, red for underlining and marking new sections), using a ruler to underline and to create headings, formatting their record of the lecture in a perfect outline with precise indentations. My indiscriminate scrawling scandalized them. “Comment tu pourras lire tout ça, après? Comment tu vas étudier?” Because, of course, the goal of “studying” was to memorize my notes and then spew them back in a paper or on an exam. My classmates did not raise their hands except, occasionally, to ask the professor – timidly – to repeat or clarify part of her lecture. When I interrupted to express a difference of opinion, or ask whether the professor’s argument would hold up if we brought such-and-such into consideration, my fellow students turned to stare at me in wonder.
The – otherwise spunky, fun, and sometimes interesting – robots who surrounded me in my classes in Paris were, I insist, made that way by the overabundance of discipline and structure imposed on all French students from an early age. It’s wearing on Axel, resilience of mohawk and devilish grin notwithstanding, and it makes my job doubly difficult.
But not impossible. Today I had a great deal of success with those CE2’s, and Axel in particular. The cheap, quick-fix, poor-pedagogy approach: measured balance of carrot (you can color at the end of class if you’re good!) and stick (one more warning, next time I’ll set you lines!). Combined with the thoughtful progressive teacher approach: a smiling “Axel! Si tu restes calme et si tu fais bien attention pendant cinq minutes, tu pourras venir devant la classe pour guider le jeu!”, followed by hearty congratulations on his feat, and then another five minutes. When he quietly celebrated his victories, I let it slide. When he got a little out of hand, I made an “easy-there” gesture and politely said, “Axel, please?” And then he remembered and snapped back into his funny, concentrated Good Boy pose. If he lets me, someday I’ll take a picture – the look on his face when he’s trying to be good is worth my entire day.
A little success today, in one of my most difficult spots, makes me hope for more. And hope, too, that my kids are strong enough not to let these schools suck their souls out of them. I think they are, or will be. And I want to help them, and hope I’m learning how.
Today I taught about Thanksgiving. I tried to find a way to do so without using any images of happy Injuns feeding grateful Pilgrims. Unfortunately, the words “voler,” “coloniser,” and “massacrer” scared my little guys a bit, and scandalized my bigger guys. So much the better, I suppose.
I did tell about how there were religious radicals from England who were having a hard time of it and went off to seek a new life in what became the United States, and how they were called Puritans and didn’t like to have any fun, and then they had to eat lots of corn. Or something. In one of my classes, this provoked Christopher to cry out: “Oh, alors, ils étaient des Témoins de Jéhovah!” If only.
I asked my CM2’s who populated the land in the Americas before the Europeans.
– “Les hommes préhistoriques!”
– “Les Français!”
– “Christophe Colomb!”
– “Les Japonais!”
… ouf.
In another of my classes, the mention of Native Americans caused Amandine to yell, “oh, les peaux rouges!” – the redskins! – and start pounding her fists on the table and chanting a sort of French version of “ooga chukka ooga chukka.” I told her that she was mocking several cultures about which she didn’t know a single thing, and that that’s racist. She said “mais ils n’ont pas de culture parce qu’ils n’existent pas!” They don’t have culture because they don’t exist. Fantastic. (Not quite up there with Madame’s famous “Racism against American Indians isn’t racism because American Indians don’t have souls,” but close.)
More mystifying than any of this about pilgrims and natives to my little lovelies was, somewhat unsurprisingly, the concept of “turkey.” Making an entire holiday out of stuffing and eating a huge one for no apparent reason scandalised them as much as colonialism and genocide did. And they were all disappointed that Americans don’t eat hot dogs on their feast days. Pride made me decline to tell them that, well, we do, sometimes.
I asked them what they were thankful for. They’re kids, so they said football and pie and Harry Potter. One kid out of 124 mentioned a member of his family. One kid mentioned Morocco, where her family comes from. Would-be teacher’s pet Julie said, “English class.”
All of this just made me very tired and very hungry and very, very sad I wasn’t at home yesterday (where apparently Uncle Steve made up to Victoria for his white repertoire of karaoke songs by singing “Old Black Joe” – thus demonstrating that a tie of insensitivity and total madness binds my family together even when we’re apart… us and Kramer, apparently).
Ludovic: “Je te préfère à l’année dernière. Je veux dire, je te préfère à la prof de l’année dernière.”1
Axel: “Je veux te faire un cadeau. Ce sera un dessin. Tu vas voir. Ce sera joli.”2
Dorian: “Comment tu dis ‘étudier’ en anglais? [...] Study! Study! [throws fist in the air] Study!!”
Anaïs, in response to my thanking her for bringing in a sweet English-language calendar that we played with: “Mais ça me fait plaisir! J’aime l’anglais parce que ça me donne un autre point de vue.”3
1. “I like you better than last year. I mean, I like you better than the teacher last year.”
2. “I want to make you a present! It will be a drawing. You’ll see. It’ll be pretty.”
3. “But I’m happy to! I like English because it gives me another point of view.”
Early yesterday morning, as I was photocopying in the salle des maîtres of my favorite school, gulping coffee and laughing with the kind maternelle teacher whose name I can never remember and whom I can hardly understand through her thick Occitane accent, something crashed against the window. We turned and saw Marie, the very young directrice, tossing a soccer ball against the glass with a wry grin. I opened the window and the ball came flying in, sending a pile of books and papers flying and knocking over the electric kettle. Followed by Marie, qui lâche “Oh, putain…” and a string of other Monday-morning expletives.
“Il y a quand même une porte, là, tu sais, Marie…” begins her colleague, to be interrupted by, “Laisse, laisse…! oh putainmerde, ya plus de café?” And follows the usual morning office gossip in which I can never take part but always love to observe.
Later, in the courtyard, watching kids file in, Marie and Vanessa and I carry on our usual smirking conversation – Mondays are difficult but we do our best. We watch Amélia, an air-headed CM1, wander at a half-run around the playground, looking everywhere but straight in front of her, and slam headfirst into the pole of a basketball hoop. She crumples to the ground, Vanessa and I run over to her. I’m terrified. Without ascertaining if the poor idiot is all right, Vanessa, choking back laughter, immediately starts yelling at her, “Mais qu’est-ce que tu fais, là? Tu regardes même pas où tu vas, c’est ridicule, tu pourrais faire un peu plus attention!”
Meanwhile the kid’s lying on the ground, pale and half-conscious. I couldn’t help laughing as I helped her to sit up and handed her a glass of water that Marie had brought.
She was fine. But it occurred to me to ask, as there are no school nurses and I’m not even confident that Mazamet has a hospital, what I should do in the event that a student really hurts herself.
Marie, dry and straight-faced: “Oh, tu fais ce que tu peux, tu appelles les parents si tu veux – les numéros sont dans le gros bouquin sur le bureau, là – mais sinon, si c’est vraiment grave et il y a plus rien à faire, bon” – she makes a chopping gesture – “tu achèves, et voilà. Y a une porte là qui est condamnée, tu vois – c’est là où on entasse les cadavres. Ça pue parfois mais qu’est-ce que tu veux, rien à faire…” And Vanessa chimes in with, “Oh, oui, et puis on a le droit de cinq pourcent de pertes… eh ben, oui, ça arrive, le plus dur, c’est les parents, ils s’emmerdent parfois…”* And so on until we rang the bell, as usual, exactly six minutes late.
A calculated lassitude and a love for dark sardonicism – welcome to my life as a schoolteacher.
*Marie: “Oh, you do what you can, you call the parents if you want – their numbers are in the fat book on the desk – but if not, if it’s really serious and there’s nothing you can do, well” – chopping gesture – “you finish them off, and voilà. There’s a boarded-up door over there, you see, that’s where we stick the bodies. It stinks sometimes but what can you do…” Vanessa: “Oh, yeah, and anyway we’re entitled to five percent losses… eh, it happens, the worst is the parents, they get all worked up sometimes…”
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.
I am sitting in the 17:09 train from Mazamet, where I work, to Toulouse, where I live.
Twelve hours ago, I had just gotten out of the shower, and I was looking at my reflection in the night-black window, carefully repeating, “Girl, you can do this.” Fighting off anxious, frustrated tears, “Girl, you’re big enough for this. You can do this.” I was conjuring demonic figures: eight classes, 124 students (with 124 first names), six hours of class time, fourteen hours until I’ll be home again.
And now here I am in the train I’ve been secretly dreaming of all day. My feet hurt from standing through six classes, from running between schools in the fifteen minute intervals that have been allotted for me to do so. I am breathing deeply.
And in my right hand I am holding a magnificent treasure: a kid-made boondoggle keychain that one of my most timid girls shyly slipped into my hands at the end of my last class.
Mireille, the directrice of that last school, looked on smiling broadly at me: “Tu as eu du succès!”
I shook my head and laughed, awestruck, drawing my hand across my forehead, sighing “Oh, oui…” as it suddenly struck me that my long, whirlwind day had come to an end. Yes, I thought, breathing erratically, smiling like an idiot and watching Mireille’s bronze wrinkles sketch an encouraging mentorly laugh, yes: I have had some success.
In my first class this morning, for example. As my first ever group of students, a sweet group of nine- and ten-year-olds governed by the most competent of the maîtresses I’ve met, hurried across the courtyard toward me, my welcoming smile, and my open classroom door, all the nervous agitation I had felt all morning evaporated. “They’re just people,” I suddenly thought. Eight individual people, with names and personalities and their own varieties of neat French handwriting and all determined and excited to learn English. To my first cheery “Hello!” answered a gleeful, giggling chorus: “’Ello!” And we were off.
I noticed right away as they made their way into the classroom that one girl lagged timidly behind. She was the only one to sit at a table by herself. We started off introducing ourselves – I approached each student, shook hands, “My name is Miss Wallace! What is your name?” We repeated “My name is…” and “What is your name?” until they could form pairs and introduce themselves to each other at the front of the class. My boys are theatrical and audacious, but their showy hijinks are so charmingly easy to bring to a halt: I simply have to force them to speak to a girl. Everyone caught on much more quickly than I’d expected.
Déborah still timidly whispered, and didn’t join the chorus of “Vast ist your names?” I made sure to smile at her but not draw too much attention to her until I was sure she had mastered something from repeating it with the whole class. We progressed quickly, and soon they had got as far as “Nice to meet you” – or, as the case may be, “Mice to beat you” – and we started to play some name games. I brought the games to a screeching halt when I realized that they were becoming a motor for the others to make fun of Déborah. We practiced the aspirate “h” – “Hhhhhello!” – and stopped the “mice” from “beating” you, and as I asked them to repeat things individually, Déborah was the first to come up with something acceptable as “Nice to meet you!” I smiled encouragingly at her and asked the rest of the class to listen so she could show them how to say it. “Nice to meet you!” she chirped, her eyes locked on mine. And by god they listened, and repeated after her. By the end of the class she was agitatedly waving her hand to volunteer to come to the front of the room to lead a complicated four-way introduction. First great success, and a wonderful way to start the day.
The next class was not so easy, but they were kind to each other and respectful of me and my offering of brief English phrases. Then, blessedly, ohh blessedly, I had two hours of rest that I will never have again, since one of my schools was taking a morning field trip. I went to the Inspection (a scary French way of saying educational administration office) and made jokes with Monsieur l’Inspecteur (not at all the Sam Spade / Waffen SS character you’d expect from someone with such a title) and told him his English was affreux. Marie Ange, my wonderful, brilliant, cannot-be-overpraised conseillère pédagogique (mostly just a friend with teaching experience and bureaucratic skills, and a buffer between me and Monsieur l’Inspecteur), eventually came bursting out of her office, where she had been wrangling with some of the many paper monsters one finds in European administrative zones. She threw up her arms and cried, “Enfin!” and hauled me off to lunch with her jovial husband, where we spent an hour and a half over food, coffee, cigarettes, and extremely pleasant conversation. I expressed my gratitude and my joy at the long break. Marie Ange gave me a Look. “Mais ce n’est qu’une petite parenthèse!”
Vive la France.
Marie Ange drove me (lefty French reggae blasting in her Saab) to my next school, and the horror that awaited. I knew this class would be a problem. They’re my biggest group, and the oldest (ten- and eleven-year-olds). Their maîtresse is disorganized and easily distracted (last week when I visited she got up to answer her cell phone and left the room in the middle of a lesson), the room is a total mess and too small, and the kids are very clearly affected by the atmosphere. Everything failed. Everything. Their attitudes were terrible, I was coming to my wits’ end, and I gave up with fifteen minutes left in class and just let them ask me questions about the United States, New York, and so on.
No, I don’t know 50 Cent.
Whatever. Try again next time. Deep breaths and move on – quickly. I sped to my last school, and arrived sweating, tired, and disheartened. My morning had gone so well, and everything that had worked with my small, well-behaved groups (who benefit from competent teaching) had completely failed with the last group and I was terrified of further failure. I considered how dramatic an injury I would have to sustain to be excused from teaching. How hard is it to break one’s own leg? Would a finger or three do?
Mireille greeted me. “Ça va?”
“Ehhh, oui.”
“Dresse-toi, tu as les CM1 d’abord, ils sont terribles.”
“Ehhh….”
“Ça va aller, tu vas voir, mais tu devras t’imposer.”
“Franchement, je veux seulement survivre la journée.”
Great. Mireille, who’s been teaching longer than I’ve been alive, says they’re “terribles.” Great.
And they were. The lesson went as well as it could have, what with the shouting and fighting. They didn’t respond to my measured tone, to my stern pauses and carefully calculated phrases the way my other classes had. They didn’t respond to turning off the light. Or hand-clapping. Or snapping at them. They didn’t respond to my lecture at the end of class on why it’s crucial that we all respect each other, that they listen to their classmates as well as to me when we speak English. I asked them if they liked English class, if they wanted to continue to learn more English. They answered a resounding: “Oui – yes!” And then continued to yell, hang upside down from their desks, hit each other, and try to grab my attention from a million directions at once. Still, they learned to introduce themselves. They didn’t get nearly as far as my morning classes, but something happened.
Then I had my littlest guys – 8-year-old CE2s. I hardly spoke a word of French to them, except once to explain something complicated that they hadn’t understood. It took them the whole class period to get the hang of introducing themselves, doing little meet-and-greet skits at the front of the room, but they were sweet and quiet and learned quickly, considering they’d never had any English. And the dynamic was good – punk-rock be-mohawked Axel’s crafty troublemaking skills were easily turned to the benefit of the class (theatricality is good in language learners), and precocious bespectacled Mohammed was happy to help the girls next to him when they had trouble. I rewarded them with some time in French at the very end, to answer their many questions. They wanted to know how big the buildings in New York are, how wide the Atlantic Ocean is and did I take a boat to get here and have I ever seen Madonna. For the second time (the first was last week when I observed the class), Julien(g) asked me skeptically whether “we” eat orange cheese. I laughed and told him I would bring him some real – white – cheddar, just as soon as I find some myself. They all want to see the Statue of Liberty. Many of them want to experience “une nouvelle culture, pour voir comment sont les gens là-bas.” I was impressed. At their age, I was a little xenophobe.
And then I had my other great success. My final class might be my favorite (I know, I know, not allowed). They all had wildly different levels of English – some still couldn’t pronounce “My name is…” at the end of our lesson, but Charlotte anxiously wanted to know whether I would be teaching them “verbs” this year and wanted to recite the full present tense conjugation of “to have” for me. Tiny Julie, with her spiky blond hair and enormous silver hoop earrings, was able to get “this is…” and “that is…,” and understand the difference; she introduced everyone in the class to me. Again, I spoke almost no French, and the lesson progressed admirably. They listened to each other – so much better even than listening to me. (Still with the mice and the beating, but so it goes.) They learn from each other, and this group does so without harangues or too much competition. And again I had a timid but talented girl – Clara – and again I was able to draw her out. At the end of class she came up to introduce herself to another girl in front of the class. She was shaking, speaking very softly and very slowly, but she did it, perfectly. All I had to do was smile at her, look her in the eye, and there it was – a whole (if short) exchange, in perfectly comprehensible English.
And on my way out she quietly slipped me this boondoggle keychain: “Maîtresse, je voulais te donner ça,” and darted off.
It made me understand how one becomes one of Those Schoolteachers, with seasonal sweaters and skirts with the alphabet or Noah’s ark stitched on, and papier-mâché earrings and macaroni necklaces their students have made for them. Okay, maybe not the seasonal sweaters, but I will be carrying around this little artifact for a long time.
