La Vague de Chaleur (Aug. 2003)
A Blue Flag Adventure (Aug. 2002)
Patio Talk (Aug. 2002)
Decoder Rings (Sept. 2002)
Eeyore and Tigger (Oct. 2002)
Wonder Woman Hangs from a Wire (Dec. 2002)
Serves Two (June 2003)
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Eeyore and Tigger
October 14, 2002
I was chatting on the phone with a friend of mine trying to explain the style of teaching that they employ here in our small French town. More specifically I was explaining the atmosphere in my son's classroom. He is seven and is in the equivalent of 1st grade. He should be in 2nd grade in the U.S.A. but since he doesn't know French, and he doesn't write in cursive he must stay back a year. Interestingly enough he can eat rice with chopsticks, do a flip on a trampoline, build a skyscraper out of Legos and name all the planets. These, unfortunately, are neither requirements nor goals of Le departement d'education.
I was trying to explain to my American friend that while life continues to be a buttery croissant, school was difficult. The way they teach is different. The way I understand it is, there is one way to do things, and one way only. There is not room for "What if?" or "How about?" The one way is "the way" accepted by young and old alike. Teaching is done with a stern voice and a good dosage of humiliation that emphasizes failures over successes. The local parents tell me this is so, in most of the classrooms, all over France. They don't necessarily agree with it, but as their shoulder-shrugs and motorboat lips suggest, "the machine is in motion, and has been for hundreds of years, so good luck trying to change it."
In elementary school in France there is not a three-recess day where children have balls to dodge, jungle gyms to climb, or hulahoops to swing. Concrete and asphalt make up their play space away from their blackboards and dictee. Fine, you say, children will create their own games. They will chase, tag, giggle and flirt. Definitely, but doesn't the body need to be stretched as much as the mind? Doesn't the energy produced by brain activity need an outlet other than the pencil?
The reality is that there are plenty of activities that the school has provided for the over taxed brain. They go to the library on Monday, run around the park on Thursday, and go to the gymnastics gymnasium on Friday. They have field trips planned and projects ongoing. But it feels different. Maybe it feels different because we comprehend less than half of the notes sent home. Maybe it feels different because we didn't go through the system ourselves and we have no feeling for what the classroom protocol is like here. Really, the difficulties are not that there is not a climbing apparatus, no, the difficulty is that the "joie de vivre", as we silly fun-loving foreigners, know it, seems to be absent from this particular first grade class. From my tiny pinhole view I have yet to see sections on French history, Science, or Art. My son is not learning about electricity, the importance of conflict resolution, or how recycling can save his planet. He doesn't learn how to jump rope at P.E., or present his scientific theory on why the egg wobbles this way and that, and he's not learning Christmas carols for the schools' December show.
After I depressed my friend with my culturally distorted view of the French school system I decided to call my mom, former teacher and now loving grandmother. I tried to explain to her, without worrying her, that her grandson was being tested. That his soft insides, barely protected by a crunchy coating, were being tested by the tap, tap, tap of the teacher's ruler. That he was in real danger of having his coating cracked. She sounded calm, as she always does, and had me agree that our coatings could afford to be tested and that sometimes that was good. "Yes," I said, "but he's seven. Perhaps later would be better?" "Perhaps," she said.
But what choice do any of us have? Do we get to decide when challenges creep toward us? Do we have a choice? Perhaps my son, at seven is better prepared to toughen his shell, than I am at 37. Maybe that is why I cry at the thought of his teacher yelling at him. Maybe that is why I hug him longer at night, and ask him a thousand times a day if he is O.K. Maybe he understands it for what it is, his reality. He accepts his time and place and moves forward through each school day. Maybe it is my shell that is cracking.
After all, he attends school without complaint and says that he has a handful of friends, even if he can't understand what they are saying to him. After all, he is learning about fromage, bread, French poems, cursive writing, and how to pronounce words that I cannot even get my lips around. After all, his teacher is giving up two lunches a week to tutor him, sending home computer games, and taping her lectures so that he might hear a proper pronunciation away from the classroom. She cares in her non-maternal, make them cry, spinster, no-TV at home, mismatching stripes and plaid, way.
A few Saturdays ago (yes, they attend school three Saturdays a month, but never on Wednesdays) my son said that he cried for the first time in school. He said that his teacher yelled at him. I sent a note on the following Monday to request a meeting to discuss our son, his progress, and her yelling. I was ready to tell her to slow down, lay off my kid, give him space, chill, get a boyfriend, change the frosty blue eye shadow, and sharpen some pencils. I wasn't ready for her to tell me, even with that concerned Doomsday look she always wears, that he is doing fine, he is progressing, and he is learning. Nor was I expecting her to tell me that she had noticed that he seems happier, has made some friends, and is starting to speak up. But she did. When we told her that he was afraid of her, that he wasn't used to being yelled at, and that he cried on Saturday, her serious face turned to surprise (she had obviously practiced this in front of a mirror over the past 30 years of her career). She said that she didn't remember him crying. We were confused. Were our cultures so different that yelling meant something different and that crying could be misinterpreted?
Now after some weeks past I am more forgiving, although still acutely aware. I have come to the slow and painful realization that things are really different, but not necessarily bad. That the teacher's style of communicating, worst case scenario with a gloomy Eeyore twist, is her way. That maybe my way, the "no reason to be happy" Tigger style is equally difficult for her to understand. More than likely I will continue to bounce around her and tug on her pinned-on tail for as long as she is in our lives. The first graders seem to accept her, why can't I?
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