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Reader, tomorrow your mouse wakes up early indeed to engage in the most trivial and yet most excruciating activity the American statistical-educational complex has to offer an aspiring doctoral student in English: from the deepest, darkest, most aliterary lairs of the Educational Testing Service, the Graduate Record Examination Subject Test in English Literature.
Say it with me, reader: what a load of flaming crap.
To those of you who possess immense erudition, knollidge, smarts, book-learnin’, mental archives of the entire canon of Anglophone literature, etc.: if you could see your way ’round to sending some of that my way through whatever means you may have at your disposal, I sure would appreciate it.
To the spirits of excellent luck, bending chance, augury, test-writer-mind-reading, and sheer dumb right-place-right-timeness: o ye! guide my number two pencil that she not err nor lead me into false belief concerning early Victorian verse forms!
To everyone who has ever taken part in any decision to require these test scores or in any part of the process of producing the tests themselves: I hope you die slowly of a combination of carpal tunnel, ritual standardized humiliation, and repeated broadsword strokes to the head, you bunch of sadistic, miserable, no-account sons of syphilitic goats. Honestly. You should be ashamed of yourselves.
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…”
