There's a saying in France that, "Le client est roi" - the customer is king. It's often viewed as being rather tongue in cheek, because everyone has at some point experienced being totally ignored by someone supposedly in the customer service sector. I remember in my first week of being here, I was waiting in a long, long queue in Fnac (yes, yes, I know), which only had one girl on the till. After about ten minutes of queuing, another girl turned up to help her out. I, in my English naivety, brightened up, expecting her to throw her jacket off and get the till opened as quickly as possible to start serving customers, as I would have done. Oh no. Instead, she wandered leisurely over to her colleague, fait la bise, naturally, and then started up a little chat with her about the weekend. So now, instead of doubling the speed of service, she actually stopped the only cashier from working - and I was the only one who was surprised by this.
Yet the fact remains that, once you get used to little idiosyncracies like this, you do actually get great service in France. Shopkeepers and even fast food servers do actually speak to you like a human being and use full sentences. You might be nothing when you're in a queue (which may explain the French's distaste for such things) but when it's your turn to be served, it doesn't matter how long it takes. Unlike in the UK, you never feel like the person is constantly checking their watch and hoping you'll hurry up so they can reach their speed-of-service target. In a pharmacy, after I'd paid for my prescription and was about to leave, the pharmacist engaged me in a long, in-depth discussion about how pretty she thought my dress was, and after I had my travel vaccinations, the doctor kept me chatting for ten minutes about the imperial monetary system in the UK. Previously, I would have felt guilty about such time-wasting, but my head has become accustomed to this very French way of not caring about keeping others waiting. Right now, I'm the customer, and it's my right to be the king.*
Even in the supermarkets, you never feel rushed. One little act of politeness I will most certainly miss when I return to Blighty in just under two weeks is the fact that cashiers wait until you have finished packing your bags, putting your change back in your purse, and are ready to depart (with a bonne soirée, naturally) before they begin scanning the next customer's items. There's no pressure, just respect, and both the cashier and the person behind you will wait quite patiently because that's what's expected. You're not herded through with a two-minutes-per-customer target time like you are in certain UK supermarkets.
Furthermore, aside from in McDo (as the French call it) and Quick, you will never see a spotty, sixteen-year-old waiter or waitress. Putting plates on tables isn't a standby for the unqualified or a Saturday job for teenagers; it is considered an art form. I don't eat out very often, an assistant's wage being nothing special, but even in the cheap restaurants or family-run crêperies that I visit, every single waiter knows how to clear and carry plates in the 5*, silver-service fashion. Good service is seen as a God-given right here, and I can't help but love a country in which I can pay less than 10 euros for a two-course meal and a quart of local cider, and have that cider poured expertly for me by a guy who's probably got more qualifications than I'll have by the time I'm thirty.
* The French attitude to time infiltrates in other ways, too. While I was in Guiana, my boyfriend and I had an hour's gap between two of his lessons. He lives five minutes from the school, and I worriedly asked him if he thought we'd have enough time to eat lunch. He looked at me, shook his head, and replied, "You have become so French..."
Monday, 29 March 2010
Thursday, 25 March 2010
Things I Never Knew About Teaching...
... when I was still at school.
- Teachers know everything that goes on in the school, even if they don't show it. They do notice when best friends fall out, and when pupils date each other. Carefully Coiffed, a 16-year-old boy in one of my classes, used to be - let's be frank here - a little shit until he recently started going out with the most intelligent girl in his class. Now his hand shoots up at every question, just to impress her, and every teacher in the staffroom is rooting for that particular relationship to last, at least until the summer holidays. And they're both still convinced we don't know.
- Teachers can spot masticating teenagers a mile off. Do they seriously think we don't know the old trick of putting chewing gum under your tongue when you answer a question? Come on. It was only six years ago that I was still at school. The same goes for surreptitious texting in the classroom, no matter how subtle they think they're being.
- Teachers never seem to tire of discussing pupils in the staffroom; it's the favourite topic of conversation. All the gossip, and dissection of their fashion senses too. Honestly, they'd be mortified if they heard what their maths teacher had to say about their new skirt.
- Teachers also appear to sense no shame or irony in announcing that a pupil they have taught for the past five years knows absolutely nothing about their respective subjects.
- It feels really quite weird for a 22-year-old unmarried female to be called 'Madame' by her 19-year-old pupils. And yes, some of them do call me that, despite the fact that I introduced myself as Zoe. I imagine it's equally weird for a fifty-something woman with three kids and thirty years of marriage under her belt to be called 'Miss' in the UK.
- Teachers know everything that goes on in the school, even if they don't show it. They do notice when best friends fall out, and when pupils date each other. Carefully Coiffed, a 16-year-old boy in one of my classes, used to be - let's be frank here - a little shit until he recently started going out with the most intelligent girl in his class. Now his hand shoots up at every question, just to impress her, and every teacher in the staffroom is rooting for that particular relationship to last, at least until the summer holidays. And they're both still convinced we don't know.
- Teachers can spot masticating teenagers a mile off. Do they seriously think we don't know the old trick of putting chewing gum under your tongue when you answer a question? Come on. It was only six years ago that I was still at school. The same goes for surreptitious texting in the classroom, no matter how subtle they think they're being.
- Teachers never seem to tire of discussing pupils in the staffroom; it's the favourite topic of conversation. All the gossip, and dissection of their fashion senses too. Honestly, they'd be mortified if they heard what their maths teacher had to say about their new skirt.
- Teachers also appear to sense no shame or irony in announcing that a pupil they have taught for the past five years knows absolutely nothing about their respective subjects.
- It feels really quite weird for a 22-year-old unmarried female to be called 'Madame' by her 19-year-old pupils. And yes, some of them do call me that, despite the fact that I introduced myself as Zoe. I imagine it's equally weird for a fifty-something woman with three kids and thirty years of marriage under her belt to be called 'Miss' in the UK.
Friday, 19 March 2010
Why It's Great To Be A Foreigner
I have a little confession to make. I often abuse my status as a foreigner - as well as the general perception that the English are all monolingual - for my own good. When approached by some market researcher/charity collector/general annoying timewaster, I simply smile apologetically, tell them I'm English, and walk away. It works almost all of the time; I have only been challenged once, and then I just ran away before he could catch me.
What makes it worse is how I do it: to make it more effective, I say, "Pardonn, je sweez on-glay" in my best (that is to say, worst) British accent, and deliberately make the gender agreement error in order to reinforce my linguistic incompetence. I discovered the hard way that people are less likely to believe that you don't understand what you're saying when you reply, "Chuis anglaise," in a reasonably authentic French accent; imagine a foreigner trying to fob you off by saying, "Sorry, mate, don't have a scooby doo what you're on about," in an Eastenders accent.
Of course, that trick works less and less these days with the growth of globalisation. Everybody speaks English these days and it's getting harder to use as an excuse for getting out of talking to somebody. A few years back, I was in Paris with my boyfriend at the time, and we were constantly getting hassled by beggars. Telling them we were English never helped because they'd learnt their spiel in several languages for the tourists. In the end, we pretended to be German: as soon as they approached, he rattled off a list of phrases he'd learnt from playing Medal of Honour, such as, "Can I see your papers, please?," "Look out, he's got a Bazooka!" and, "The American has dog biscuits in his pocket." They usually went away fairly quickly; I'm not sure if it's because they didn't understand German, or because they did and they decided they didn't want to be near anyone with a Bazooka or dog biscuits in his pocket.
Still, I'm not sure if even German would work as a shield against being harassed any more, as we become more and more multilingual. Hopefully, my conversational Arabic will help for a few more years yet, although it could potentially get me into trouble as I've learnt most of it from Hakim songs so most of the phrases I know are just chat-up lines. And, you never know, learning Irish Gaelic one weekend when I was bored may well come in useful in this respect one day. At the very least, there's always the Latin - as long as I never get asked to fill in a questionnaire by a public schoolboy or the Pope.
What makes it worse is how I do it: to make it more effective, I say, "Pardonn, je sweez on-glay" in my best (that is to say, worst) British accent, and deliberately make the gender agreement error in order to reinforce my linguistic incompetence. I discovered the hard way that people are less likely to believe that you don't understand what you're saying when you reply, "Chuis anglaise," in a reasonably authentic French accent; imagine a foreigner trying to fob you off by saying, "Sorry, mate, don't have a scooby doo what you're on about," in an Eastenders accent.
Of course, that trick works less and less these days with the growth of globalisation. Everybody speaks English these days and it's getting harder to use as an excuse for getting out of talking to somebody. A few years back, I was in Paris with my boyfriend at the time, and we were constantly getting hassled by beggars. Telling them we were English never helped because they'd learnt their spiel in several languages for the tourists. In the end, we pretended to be German: as soon as they approached, he rattled off a list of phrases he'd learnt from playing Medal of Honour, such as, "Can I see your papers, please?," "Look out, he's got a Bazooka!" and, "The American has dog biscuits in his pocket." They usually went away fairly quickly; I'm not sure if it's because they didn't understand German, or because they did and they decided they didn't want to be near anyone with a Bazooka or dog biscuits in his pocket.
Still, I'm not sure if even German would work as a shield against being harassed any more, as we become more and more multilingual. Hopefully, my conversational Arabic will help for a few more years yet, although it could potentially get me into trouble as I've learnt most of it from Hakim songs so most of the phrases I know are just chat-up lines. And, you never know, learning Irish Gaelic one weekend when I was bored may well come in useful in this respect one day. At the very least, there's always the Latin - as long as I never get asked to fill in a questionnaire by a public schoolboy or the Pope.
Thursday, 18 March 2010
The Good, The Bad, And The Homicide-Inducing
I have a number of students who make me light up just by walking into the classroom. There's Sensitive, a lovely, quiet boy with a side parting and a propensity for wearing roll-neck jumpers; he blushes every time I talk to him, and after I recently found my name and a rather flattering cartoon of me surrounded by hearts in his textbook, I now know why. Then there's Sunshine, who won my heart in her very first lesson with me by telling me that her favourite hobby was, "smiling," - and she wasn't lying. There's Earnest, who works harder than any student I've ever known and always has her hand up, but regularly bursts into tears because it never seems to make a difference - she has an A* for effort and enthusiasm but an F for actual ability. There's Philosopher, a brilliantly imaginative boy who often teaches me things when he weaves in original ideas and information from books he's read or documetaries he's seen into his presentations, and who is desperately trying to cultivate a moustache in an incredibly endearing way. There's Mr Boombastic, a cheeky little so-and-so who tries to chat me up in class (in that very French, charming way) but who is all talk - he turns as red as a beetroot if I ever joke back to him.
And then there's Prima Donna*. She is a tall, willowy blonde who is naturally going to be a famous singer one day, so she doesn't need to worry about a silly little thing like English. Unfortunately, she's also the coolest kid in the class so everyone else follows her lead: when Prima Donna talks while I'm trying to explain something, so do all the others.
Every teacher has a student - usually more than one - who gets to them. I know various ex-teachers who, years on, still shudder when they say certain names aloud. My family and partner know Prima Donna's name well, such is the amount of dread and foreboding in my voice when I mention her - and I usually do have to mention her a lot. I will admit that her class have, on at least one occasion, driven me to tears - thankfully once they'd left the classroom - out of sheer frustration. One of the problems of being female is that it's difficult to be heard over lots of noise; if I raise my voice, it just becomes high-pitched and shrill. There's a reason Margaret Thatcher had to have training to lower the pitch of her voice if she wanted any hope of sounding authoritative in Parliament, or even of being heard at all.
So when you manage to finally get somewhere with a student like that, you could practically bottle the relief and euphoria that flows through you. There is a human child in that devil spawn after all!
It happened completely by accident. I'd planned a lesson on star signs and horoscopes, not expecting much, so I was amazed to hear Prima Donna say, "Ah, c'est cool, ça," when she read the sheet I'd given her. It turned out that she was massively into astrology, so she got stuck in to dissecting the character analysis for her star sign straight away. And where Prima Donna goes, the others follow and soon they were excitedly discussing their star signs and writing horoscopes for each other.
I couldn't believe it. I don't expect that it will last long, but it felt incredible when, instead of the usual pouts, churlish silence when asked a question and haughty looks, she even called me 'Madame' and asked about some of the vocabulary. God knows what'll happen in the next lesson - I obviously can't do the Zodiac every week - but I feel a little glimmer of hope at least.
As an added bonus, I asked them how many believed in their horoscopes and about a third did. Then I gave them what I told them was their horoscopes from the day before - in fact, I'd taken some from the internet over a month earlier and doctored them a bit. Almost all of them gasped about how spookily accurate they were; in the next vote, the number who said they believed in horoscopes doubled. I still haven't decided whether or not to 'fess up.
* Up until an embarrassingly late age, I had only ever heard this word spoken, and so I thought it was actually Pre-Madonna. It made sense to me: a wannabe diva who hadn't quite got there yet. It wasn't until I finally read the libretto of Phantom of the Opera that I realised my mistake...
And then there's Prima Donna*. She is a tall, willowy blonde who is naturally going to be a famous singer one day, so she doesn't need to worry about a silly little thing like English. Unfortunately, she's also the coolest kid in the class so everyone else follows her lead: when Prima Donna talks while I'm trying to explain something, so do all the others.
Every teacher has a student - usually more than one - who gets to them. I know various ex-teachers who, years on, still shudder when they say certain names aloud. My family and partner know Prima Donna's name well, such is the amount of dread and foreboding in my voice when I mention her - and I usually do have to mention her a lot. I will admit that her class have, on at least one occasion, driven me to tears - thankfully once they'd left the classroom - out of sheer frustration. One of the problems of being female is that it's difficult to be heard over lots of noise; if I raise my voice, it just becomes high-pitched and shrill. There's a reason Margaret Thatcher had to have training to lower the pitch of her voice if she wanted any hope of sounding authoritative in Parliament, or even of being heard at all.
So when you manage to finally get somewhere with a student like that, you could practically bottle the relief and euphoria that flows through you. There is a human child in that devil spawn after all!
It happened completely by accident. I'd planned a lesson on star signs and horoscopes, not expecting much, so I was amazed to hear Prima Donna say, "Ah, c'est cool, ça," when she read the sheet I'd given her. It turned out that she was massively into astrology, so she got stuck in to dissecting the character analysis for her star sign straight away. And where Prima Donna goes, the others follow and soon they were excitedly discussing their star signs and writing horoscopes for each other.
I couldn't believe it. I don't expect that it will last long, but it felt incredible when, instead of the usual pouts, churlish silence when asked a question and haughty looks, she even called me 'Madame' and asked about some of the vocabulary. God knows what'll happen in the next lesson - I obviously can't do the Zodiac every week - but I feel a little glimmer of hope at least.
As an added bonus, I asked them how many believed in their horoscopes and about a third did. Then I gave them what I told them was their horoscopes from the day before - in fact, I'd taken some from the internet over a month earlier and doctored them a bit. Almost all of them gasped about how spookily accurate they were; in the next vote, the number who said they believed in horoscopes doubled. I still haven't decided whether or not to 'fess up.
* Up until an embarrassingly late age, I had only ever heard this word spoken, and so I thought it was actually Pre-Madonna. It made sense to me: a wannabe diva who hadn't quite got there yet. It wasn't until I finally read the libretto of Phantom of the Opera that I realised my mistake...
Wednesday, 17 March 2010
What A Lot Of Gaul
When I was in my first year of university, my classmate (the one who is now my partner) and I devised a mischievous plan as part of our ongoing battle against our jobsworth, oh-so-patriotic French tutor. For our oral exam, we would debate the motion 'The French believe that the world revolves around France'. We would do it completely over-the-top, tongue-in-cheek, and annoy her so much that she would give us 2.1s instead of Firsts, but hey, it's first year and the grades don't count, so it would be worth it for the sheer entertainment value. Unfortunately, for a number of reasons (of which cowardice was not one) the plan never transpired. Now, two years later, I'm discovering that our proposition was not quite as ludicrous as we'd once believed.
When it comes to taking undeserved credit for things, the French beat Gordon Brown hands down. It is absolutely incredibly just how many things - small, insignificant and thus all the more frustrating things - that they will claim as French without a hint of irony. It struck me how much this was the case when my housemate happened to play 'A Whole New World' from Aladdin one day. It was in French and I didn't know the words so, as I was baking in the kitchen, I began to sing along with the English lyrics. She looked at me, open-mouthed: "C'est quoi, ça?"
I smiled. "Well, it's the original lyrics. You know, from the original film."
She snorted with laughter. "What are you talking about? The original film is French!"
"You can't possibly be serious. Walt Disney was American! All Disney films are American."
"Quoi? Disney is French. He built Disneyland in Paris, didn't he?"
In the end, it took twenty minutes on Wikipedia and a number of YouTube clips of the same song in German, Hungarian, Chinese, Arabic and so on to convince her.
Something like that is so ridiculous that I can laugh it off. I can even cope when, after promising my housemates an authentic English dessert, I made them an apple crumble, only to be told, "Ah, but apple crumble is French!"
What I cannot allow to slide is the heinous violation of my heritage that comes from a Frenchman claiming that they invented the sandwich. I am not proud of what I did, but there are some things an English girl has to do to protect the honour of her country. I'll be packing my suitcases, but when the Rennes police find the dead body of a Frenchman with a picture of the Earl of Sandwich shoved up his left nostril and, "Show me another French word with a w in it!" scrawled on his corpse with a board marker, they won't need too many clues to find the perpetrator.
When it comes to taking undeserved credit for things, the French beat Gordon Brown hands down. It is absolutely incredibly just how many things - small, insignificant and thus all the more frustrating things - that they will claim as French without a hint of irony. It struck me how much this was the case when my housemate happened to play 'A Whole New World' from Aladdin one day. It was in French and I didn't know the words so, as I was baking in the kitchen, I began to sing along with the English lyrics. She looked at me, open-mouthed: "C'est quoi, ça?"
I smiled. "Well, it's the original lyrics. You know, from the original film."
She snorted with laughter. "What are you talking about? The original film is French!"
"You can't possibly be serious. Walt Disney was American! All Disney films are American."
"Quoi? Disney is French. He built Disneyland in Paris, didn't he?"
In the end, it took twenty minutes on Wikipedia and a number of YouTube clips of the same song in German, Hungarian, Chinese, Arabic and so on to convince her.
Something like that is so ridiculous that I can laugh it off. I can even cope when, after promising my housemates an authentic English dessert, I made them an apple crumble, only to be told, "Ah, but apple crumble is French!"
What I cannot allow to slide is the heinous violation of my heritage that comes from a Frenchman claiming that they invented the sandwich. I am not proud of what I did, but there are some things an English girl has to do to protect the honour of her country. I'll be packing my suitcases, but when the Rennes police find the dead body of a Frenchman with a picture of the Earl of Sandwich shoved up his left nostril and, "Show me another French word with a w in it!" scrawled on his corpse with a board marker, they won't need too many clues to find the perpetrator.
Tuesday, 9 March 2010
What's In A Number?
As well as the variation in levels, another difference I noticed between schools in Guiana and Brittany is the demographic of teachers. The majority of teachers in my boyfriend's schools were around 35 or under; in my school, almost all of them are in their late forties and there's only one under 35. Bizarrely - and I think this is just a coincidence - a large proportion of them are in interracial marriages, that is to say, a white French woman married to an African, Arab or Asian man. I have no idea why all the non-racist people in France appear to have gathered together in one school, but there you go.
However, the age difference is unsurprising when you look at how teaching works in France. Unlike in the UK, teachers in France are actually civil servants: once they've passed their exams*, assuming they remain fit to teach and don't turn out to be paedophiles, they have employment for life. Hence why they go on strike far more often than their British counterparts.
The designation of French teachers works rather like the Army: instead of applying for jobs in individual schools, as we do, they instead get posted to schools by the government. They can choose the académie (academic region) or at least make a request, but they don't choose the school they are assigned to. In theory, each posting is a contract for a few years, but they can choose to extend it if they wish.
Unsurprisingly, the more experience you have as a teacher, the more clout you have when it comes to getting your preferred académie. NQTs almost always get the dirty jobs that no one else wants, while seasoned veterans can practically pick and choose. This is why so many new or new-ish teachers end up in the overseas départements. They know they're likely to get in because no one wants to go there due to the poor school results, but if they apply for anywhere better, they'll be lumbered with worse - ie the suburbs of Paris - so they hedge their bets and figure that at least they can get a tan. Or, if we're being less cynical, the teachers who choose to go to the DOMs are young, single and still looking for a bit of adventure and jungle trekking before they settle down in the south of France.
Brittany, on the other hand, is one of the most desired académies - supposedly due to its high school results but I'm tempted to believe that the amazing cider has something to do with it too. Which is why my school is populated with highly experienced teachers who have done their bit, slogging it in the ZEPs (Zone Education Prioritaire - basically ASBO Central), and are finally settling into probably their last posting in a cushy job in a nice Breton lycée, with kids who know how to spell Proust and who say, "Bonjour Madame," every morning to you.
I promise I'll stop blathering on about education theory and get back to the guess-what-my-students-said-this-week anecdotes soon.
* Which are competitive; in other words, if there are 50 places and 100 entrants, the top 50 will pass and the rest will fail, even if they get, say, 95%.
However, the age difference is unsurprising when you look at how teaching works in France. Unlike in the UK, teachers in France are actually civil servants: once they've passed their exams*, assuming they remain fit to teach and don't turn out to be paedophiles, they have employment for life. Hence why they go on strike far more often than their British counterparts.
The designation of French teachers works rather like the Army: instead of applying for jobs in individual schools, as we do, they instead get posted to schools by the government. They can choose the académie (academic region) or at least make a request, but they don't choose the school they are assigned to. In theory, each posting is a contract for a few years, but they can choose to extend it if they wish.
Unsurprisingly, the more experience you have as a teacher, the more clout you have when it comes to getting your preferred académie. NQTs almost always get the dirty jobs that no one else wants, while seasoned veterans can practically pick and choose. This is why so many new or new-ish teachers end up in the overseas départements. They know they're likely to get in because no one wants to go there due to the poor school results, but if they apply for anywhere better, they'll be lumbered with worse - ie the suburbs of Paris - so they hedge their bets and figure that at least they can get a tan. Or, if we're being less cynical, the teachers who choose to go to the DOMs are young, single and still looking for a bit of adventure and jungle trekking before they settle down in the south of France.
Brittany, on the other hand, is one of the most desired académies - supposedly due to its high school results but I'm tempted to believe that the amazing cider has something to do with it too. Which is why my school is populated with highly experienced teachers who have done their bit, slogging it in the ZEPs (Zone Education Prioritaire - basically ASBO Central), and are finally settling into probably their last posting in a cushy job in a nice Breton lycée, with kids who know how to spell Proust and who say, "Bonjour Madame," every morning to you.
I promise I'll stop blathering on about education theory and get back to the guess-what-my-students-said-this-week anecdotes soon.
* Which are competitive; in other words, if there are 50 places and 100 entrants, the top 50 will pass and the rest will fail, even if they get, say, 95%.
Sunday, 7 March 2010
Wonderwall
The other day, I used Wonderwall by Oasis with one of my classes, as music is generally a good way to get them talking without realising it. One of the follow-up activities was to get the students to read out some of the lines for pronunciation practice.
"And affter all, you're my wonderwall," one of them read.
"That's good," I replied, "You just need to think about that first vowel in 'after'. It's 'ah-fter', remember, like the vowel in 'aunt' that we practiced before?"
"Affter."
"Not quite - listen again. Ah-fter. Can you say that? Ah-fter."
"No, 'e said affter in ze song."
The student was so determined that she was right on this one that she made me play that section of the song again, grinning triumphantly when Liam Gallagher did, of course, sing 'affter'. And what could I do? I explained that he spoke a Northern dialect which does in fact use the short 'a', as well as dropping 'h's, which I'm always telling them off for doing. I explained that I spoke Standard English with at least the remnants of an RP accent*, and that was the dialect usually taught to foreign speakers of English. However, I couldn't actually tell them that what they were saying was wrong. Damn you, Liam Gallagher.
The UK has an amazingly high number of dialects - far more than most European countries, I'd wager, especially given its size. In France, there's only really Parisian, Breton, Ch'ti, Southern and Tours (the latter being generally accepted as the 'best' French) - there are more than that between Birmingham and Edinburgh alone. This makes life pretty difficult for teaching English because the majority of people don't have the standard accent; I do wonder how the Scottish and Mancunian assistants nearby get on. Should they try to change their accent for teaching purposes in order to avoid confusion, or just speak normally and acknowledge that they have a different but equally valid way of speaking?
Most of the time, it doesn't matter too much as I only really insist on certain aspects of pronunciation, such as 'h', 'th' (instead of 's' or 'z') and stress. I only picked on that particular vowel because it was a common mistake: my students tend to blend a lot of vowels together so that (because of the dropped 'h'), the words: 'hut', 'hat', 'hot', 'out' and 'ate' are pronounced almost identically - something a bit like 'put' but without the 'p'. Still, I've learnt my lesson and will never use Oasis for pronunciation exercises again. I can only thank my lucky stars I didn't use that song where they manage to somehow fit four syllables into the word 'sunshine'.
* Which moving to Suffolk, going to university, and dating a Northerner have begun to kill off.
"And affter all, you're my wonderwall," one of them read.
"That's good," I replied, "You just need to think about that first vowel in 'after'. It's 'ah-fter', remember, like the vowel in 'aunt' that we practiced before?"
"Affter."
"Not quite - listen again. Ah-fter. Can you say that? Ah-fter."
"No, 'e said affter in ze song."
The student was so determined that she was right on this one that she made me play that section of the song again, grinning triumphantly when Liam Gallagher did, of course, sing 'affter'. And what could I do? I explained that he spoke a Northern dialect which does in fact use the short 'a', as well as dropping 'h's, which I'm always telling them off for doing. I explained that I spoke Standard English with at least the remnants of an RP accent*, and that was the dialect usually taught to foreign speakers of English. However, I couldn't actually tell them that what they were saying was wrong. Damn you, Liam Gallagher.
The UK has an amazingly high number of dialects - far more than most European countries, I'd wager, especially given its size. In France, there's only really Parisian, Breton, Ch'ti, Southern and Tours (the latter being generally accepted as the 'best' French) - there are more than that between Birmingham and Edinburgh alone. This makes life pretty difficult for teaching English because the majority of people don't have the standard accent; I do wonder how the Scottish and Mancunian assistants nearby get on. Should they try to change their accent for teaching purposes in order to avoid confusion, or just speak normally and acknowledge that they have a different but equally valid way of speaking?
Most of the time, it doesn't matter too much as I only really insist on certain aspects of pronunciation, such as 'h', 'th' (instead of 's' or 'z') and stress. I only picked on that particular vowel because it was a common mistake: my students tend to blend a lot of vowels together so that (because of the dropped 'h'), the words: 'hut', 'hat', 'hot', 'out' and 'ate' are pronounced almost identically - something a bit like 'put' but without the 'p'. Still, I've learnt my lesson and will never use Oasis for pronunciation exercises again. I can only thank my lucky stars I didn't use that song where they manage to somehow fit four syllables into the word 'sunshine'.
* Which moving to Suffolk, going to university, and dating a Northerner have begun to kill off.
Friday, 5 March 2010
Why Teachers Have High Blood Pressure
During my trip to French Guiana (see previous note if you're reading this on Facebook), I had the interesting experience of helping out my boyfriend, who is also a language assistant, with some of his classes. I expected a lower level; firstly, he teaches younger students than I do, and secondly, Rennes is one of the best-performing academic regions in France while Guiana is one of the worst-performing. However, it was still a hell of a shock.
In one troisieme class (equivalent of Year 10 in the UK), I asked one girl if she had any pets. She thought about it for several minutes before mustering all the efforts of at least four years of learning English to reply, "Me dog."
In a seconde class (Year 11), we revised the simple past and got them to write a single sentence describing what they did in the holidays. After extensive revision on how to form the past with regular verbs, a game to practice their formation, the words "play -> played" written on the board and ten minutes of writing time, one boy still managed to produce "I play football".
What the hell is an assistant meant to do with a kid like that? Now, I realise that my experience of language learning was very different to that of these children; plus, as someone who loves languages and finds them easy to learn, I know it is important to remember that not everyone will pick things up quite as quickly. But there is no way to achieve the oh-so-lofty British Council ideals of 'cultural exchange' and 'aiding spoken fluency' when the students' level of English is so poor that you are reduced to revising basic grammar every lesson. Frankly, in those situations, it is difficult to see the point of having an assistant at all, aside from the fact that some of the real teachers don't even speak particularly brilliant English either.
One of the problems stems from the lack of setting in the French education system; thanks to good old liberté, égalité, fraternité, almost all lessons are mixed-ability, an idea I have always detested. At best, this means that the strongest students are bored (or pretend not to be strong so as not to get bullied)so they mess around, the weakest students don't have a clue what's going on and are embarrassed about it so they mess around, and the average students don't stand a chance of learning anything among all the chaos. At worst, you end up with extremes like one seconde class in which my boyfriend is expected to be able to teach the same lesson to a girl from St Lucia who is practically bilingual, and a boy who can't read the sentence, "Where did you go?" off the board.
One more particular bete noire of mine: just about every ESL/TEFL resource will tell you to pair weak students with strong students during groupwork activities because they can help each other. No, no, and no. As someone who had to put up with this for years at school, I can tell you that it doesn't work. I just got incredibly frustrated at the other person and at never being able to stretch myself by being able to have a discussion at the level I wanted. Then, when I got to university and suddenly wasn't top of the class anymore - far from it, in fact - I got to experience being the weaker student in the pair. That's no better, because I just ended up tongue-tied and not wanting to say anything at all for fear of embarrassing myself in front of a peer who was so much better than me.*
Segregation in education has its problems, sure, especially when you take it to extremes, as in Germany. But there are times when I get sick of all this twaddle about everyone being the same, and this is one of them.
* The fact that, two years later, I ended up dating that very same peer I was too terrified to speak French to is irrelevant. *grin*
In one troisieme class (equivalent of Year 10 in the UK), I asked one girl if she had any pets. She thought about it for several minutes before mustering all the efforts of at least four years of learning English to reply, "Me dog."
In a seconde class (Year 11), we revised the simple past and got them to write a single sentence describing what they did in the holidays. After extensive revision on how to form the past with regular verbs, a game to practice their formation, the words "play -> played" written on the board and ten minutes of writing time, one boy still managed to produce "I play football".
What the hell is an assistant meant to do with a kid like that? Now, I realise that my experience of language learning was very different to that of these children; plus, as someone who loves languages and finds them easy to learn, I know it is important to remember that not everyone will pick things up quite as quickly. But there is no way to achieve the oh-so-lofty British Council ideals of 'cultural exchange' and 'aiding spoken fluency' when the students' level of English is so poor that you are reduced to revising basic grammar every lesson. Frankly, in those situations, it is difficult to see the point of having an assistant at all, aside from the fact that some of the real teachers don't even speak particularly brilliant English either.
One of the problems stems from the lack of setting in the French education system; thanks to good old liberté, égalité, fraternité, almost all lessons are mixed-ability, an idea I have always detested. At best, this means that the strongest students are bored (or pretend not to be strong so as not to get bullied)so they mess around, the weakest students don't have a clue what's going on and are embarrassed about it so they mess around, and the average students don't stand a chance of learning anything among all the chaos. At worst, you end up with extremes like one seconde class in which my boyfriend is expected to be able to teach the same lesson to a girl from St Lucia who is practically bilingual, and a boy who can't read the sentence, "Where did you go?" off the board.
One more particular bete noire of mine: just about every ESL/TEFL resource will tell you to pair weak students with strong students during groupwork activities because they can help each other. No, no, and no. As someone who had to put up with this for years at school, I can tell you that it doesn't work. I just got incredibly frustrated at the other person and at never being able to stretch myself by being able to have a discussion at the level I wanted. Then, when I got to university and suddenly wasn't top of the class anymore - far from it, in fact - I got to experience being the weaker student in the pair. That's no better, because I just ended up tongue-tied and not wanting to say anything at all for fear of embarrassing myself in front of a peer who was so much better than me.*
Segregation in education has its problems, sure, especially when you take it to extremes, as in Germany. But there are times when I get sick of all this twaddle about everyone being the same, and this is one of them.
* The fact that, two years later, I ended up dating that very same peer I was too terrified to speak French to is irrelevant. *grin*
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