In writing last week’s post, French Polish: Part 1, I unearthed a vein so rich in material that I simply had to divide it into two. Mining the storyline of my own North American kid attending a French maternelle was simply chock-a-bloc with us-versus-them run-ins and a few sublime ah-ha’s.
Last week we established exactly how Pierre’s and my then-three-year-old, English-speaking daughter ended up at a French maternelle this year – how we chose to follow this course despite the fact that French instructors, in a style that’s ultra shocking to North American parents, sometimes call their pupils “nulles” (zeroes). We discovered École St-Philippe Néri. We met the teacher of la Petite Section and her aids, and the 33 kids in their charge. We learned about la consigne (directions) and how Laurelle refused to follow them. We emerged from an episode of strangulation (with Laurelle playing the brute). We discovered jewels. And then Laurelle discovered the French language, unlocking both her tongue and layers of built-up, school-imposed frustration.
Finally, a long month and a half after the school year had begun, it was time to get on with real life inside a French maternelle.
What was most striking to Pierre and me about schooling in France was the uniformity. Again, had I read Jean-Benoît Nadeau and Julie Barlow’s Sixty Million Frenchmen Can’t Be Wrong before arriving in the country last summer, I wouldn’t have been so surprised at what I found.
“All pre-university education in France has three common features:” Nadeau and Barlow write, “national standards, uniformity of education, and authoritative teachers.” They flesh out their statement with observations and statistics, like:
· “The French education system is specially designed to serve the interests of an extremely centralized country…A good basic education is available to all....”
· “About 20 percent of the twelve million pre-university students attend private schools, but four private schools out of five are actually subsidized by the State and follow the national syllabus, which is controlled closely by the State.”
Indeed, Laurelle’s St-Philippe falls into this category, being described as “un établissement privé sous contrat” (a private establishment “under contract”). That’s to say St-Philippe follows the French national syllabus and its teachers are paid by the State. The happy upshot is that our annual – ANNUAL – bill for sending our kid to private school amounts to a mere EUR 500, after refunds from the State toward meals taken in the school’s cantine.
· “[France’s 950,000] teachers and professors belong to one single system called the French Ministry of Education. The main objective of the Ministry is to dispense education uniformly throughout the French territory. There is no concept of local needs or particularities. Teachers are theoretically interchangeable….”
Pierre and I actually figured out this point about uniformity on our own. Cold weather had crept into the area early last winter, and so all 33 kids in Laurelle’s maternelle class needed to learn how to put on their coats, all by themselves.
Laurelle demonstrated the three-step process with glee one afternoon in our family room. She laid her long, bulky winter coat on the floor, unzipped and face up with the hood at her feet. Next she knelt over the coat and put her arms into the sleeves. And then in one final flurry, she stood straight, lifting her coat and flipping it over her head and onto her body.
The first few times she did this I got whipped in the face.
Then we noticed something peculiar – at a local restaurant. We’d finished our meals, and while Pierre occupied himself with the bill, I gathered markers and other sanity-saving tools. Neither of us had noticed Laurelle placing her coat on the restaurant floor – in close proximity of an older couple seated nearby. One, two… – before we could warn the couple, they had lurched away from the flying coat. They already knew.
What made the incident clearer to Pierre and me was one of Laurelle’s picture books. La Maternelle dealt with life at a French preschool.
La Maternelle fascinated Laurelle. It captivated us, too. One page demonstrated how kids learn to put on their coats. One, two, three. Another page showed a hallway outside the maternelle classroom, little coat hooks beneath each child’s name and photo – just like the hallway outside Laurelle’s classroom. Another page showed napping arrangement with little beds lined up in a big room, each child hugging one special doudou (stuffed toy) brought from home – just like during Laurelle’s sieste.
The more we read La Maternelle, the more we got it. This book was St-Philippe. It was EVERY maternelle in France.
If the kids’ days evolved in cookie cutter-fashion, we soon learned that their subject matters did, too.
In these early months Pierre and I never received written feedback about Laurelle’s progress. We’d relied on patched-together, (verbal) Daily Reports and the occasional smiley or straight faces that appeared on a particular item of work. Laurelle’s life was mostly smiley and occasionally au coin.
From Christmas break onward, through, parents joined the scholastic circle. We could review our child’s progress every few months on the Grid.
The Grid (my name for it) was an impressive, eight-page list of competences that each student was to acquire during his three years in maternelle – the instruction before primary school. Next to the list of attributes were three columns that indicated which lessons the child would learn during Petite Section (as Laurelle attended), and which were designated for the following two years (Moyenne Section and Grande Section). The competencies were subdivided into seven sections and then further into subsections, with these sorts of goals targeted for la Petite Section:
ü Acquiring language (speaking, understanding, vocabulary and courtesies)
ü Discovering writing (listening to stories, recognizing names and numbers)
ü Preparing to read and write (learning rhymes and correct pronunciations)
ü Becoming a student (speaking, responding, not interrupting, following rules, cooperating)
ü Using the body (running, jumping, sliding, rolling)
ü Discovering the world (five senses, comparison, organization of the day, right vs left)
ü Feeling, imagining and believing (singing, listening for pleasure or movement)
A blue “X” appeared in each box for a competency acquired during Petite Section. The same report would follow each pupil through Moyenne and Grande Sections, with green and yellow “X”’s, respectively, appearing in these later years.
Sometimes Pierre and I shook our heads at the maternelle’s rigidity. At the slowness of its pace. The kids didn’t even start holding crayons until January!
At the same time, we marveled at the balance and well thought-out corridors of teaching, ensuring that no one was left behind (without meaning to sound political.) Gone – well gone – was America’s over-effusive praise for scribbling.
The system’s effort in teaching manners deserves a separate note here – if only for its charm. Listed on the Grid’s required competencies for la Petite Section were salutations (bonjour, au revoir); courtesies (s’il vous plaît, merci); rules of politeness (not interrupting); and rules of behavior (respecting other people and their belongings, following rules). What’s more, Laurelle’s teacher Aurore taught her students to greet her each morning with a kiss on the cheek – a rule that our daughter sometimes actually remembered!
As the year moved on, Laurelle’s Grid became populated with gorgeous blue X’s. Then lo and behold, in mid-February, the end of Term 3 (in a school year that divided neatly into five parts on account of long school holidays), parents received their first, personalized, written feedback.
“Laurelle,” Aurore began her note in French, your first language isn’t French, but you have found your place at the heart of the class, making friends and progressing enormously to rapidly acquire vocabulary that allows you to share at school. Bravo! You are brillante….
Brilliant! My girl was brilliant! She was hardly a nulle! I could hardly hide my delight – and relief. I brushed over Aurore’s last sentence about Laurelle needing to follow the rules better.
Daily Reports improved – that’s my memory of them anyway during this period of brilliante work – with the most enduring hiccup relating to naptime. Laurelle hadn’t exactly reverted to her Term 1 antics during la sieste (one time jumping on her canvas bed with such barbarity that she broke it in a mighty crash), but she was hardly sage during this period of enforced quiet.
So we adjusted our rules: If she couldn’t actually sleep during naptime at school, then she needed to rest – and do so quietly. No talking. No singing. No tapping. No chirping. And no jumping. No good sieste meant no jewel. (We’d added a new, nap-related rule to our reward system outlined in French Polish: Part 1).
Laurelle’s pink and purple crystal jewel pile mounted. Jewels became a pillar of our family life. One winter Sunday during the children’s sermon – we attend an Anglican church in Cannes – the speaker drew parallels for the kids between God, their Heavenly Father, and their fathers here on earth.
“What does your father give you when you make him happy?” the leader asked a group of 15 gathered children at the front of the church. A good 200 folks in the congregation listened in.
Laurelle was the first to answer the question. Her little voice rang clearly in the large hall, “He gives me jewels!”
Term 4 at St-Philippe ended in mid-April. Aurore again dispersed the Grid and a new note. But before reading it, I learned that I had a talker. Aurore explained that it’d become necessary to separate the big talkers during group work, interspersing them with the quiet ones. It was the only way to get anything done in a classroom of 30-some preschoolers.
Here’s why she sought me out with this little bit of organizational theory. Not only was my daughter one of the talkers. She was THE talker of all the talkers. Talking was hardwired into her personality.
Great, I thought, Laurelle is getting the language. Term 4’s note explained more fully.
“Laurelle,” Aurore had written, I wish that you would participate more because often you prefer to talk with your neighbours! I congratulate you for all the progress you have made in French as well as for the excellent work that you’ve done! Continue your efforts and understand that I am interested in you but that I also have to occupy myself with 31 other students.
Pierre’s colleagues often refer to him – jokingly, respectfully and, I fear, truthfully – as a “shit-disturber.” It’s obviously hereditary.
The end of the school year came quickly for Aurore. She went on medical leave for a scheduled surgery. Losing a teacher for the last month of school is hardly ideal – sad, even, when you’ve lucked out with a devoted one like her.
Given France’s policy of uniformity, though, teachers are imminently replaceable. That’s the theory anyway. Clémentine, Aurore’s stand-in, looked like she just graduated from school herself, but we ran with it.
The final weeks have been good ones for Laurelle. She has taken her stuffed killer whale Orquebella in the car every morning, instructing the beast to have a good day at school, to listen to la consigne and to sleep – and noting that she wants a Good Report after school. Once at school, Laurelle has swept into the classroom, bestowing kisses and hugs on whichever classmates she favours that moment (neatly circumventing a kiss to Clémentine’s cheek as the new teacher doesn’t reinforce Aurore’s set greeting). My little socialite then has led a bevy of girls (not boys, who are often “scary”) by the hand to make up rules for some new game. Hardly a dull moment.
And Laurelle has returned home in the afternoons with Good Reports. “Mommy, mommy,” she has called to me, spinning into the house like a Tasmanian Devil. “I had a good day! I was sage and I dormed!” Which is perfect franglais for saying she was good and that she slept. A two-jewel day.
Either things have improved wholeheartedly at the tail end of school – or else Clémentine is a bit of a softie. (Laurelle has since confirmed that her new teacher doesn’t have so many rules.)
My little one recently brought home her Term 5 and Year-End report, written by Aurore from afar. The letter had a familiar ring:
“Laurelle,” Aurore wrote, “all your competences are practically acquired, bravo!... Really good progress the whole year with the acquisition of a new language and several other competences, congratulations! Just a little more attention to following the rules!”
Looking through Laurelle’s final blue X’s on the Grid, there was no difficulty figuring out exactly what Aurore meant. My daughter has absolutely no problem with the head stuff. But the yawning holes in her trail of blue X’s were these:
ü Saying bonjour and au revoir, s’il vous plaît and merci
ü Not interrupting others
ü Respecting other people and their things
ü Following rules dictated by adults
Again, Nadeau and Barlow had been right. French kids do learn their manners much earlier than their peers.
Sending Laurelle to a French maternelle – giving her the chance to pick up a second language and culture at a time they’d sink in – had been one of our central motives for living in France this year. At this juncture, I’m considering a gambit to stay on a second year.
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