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*