Work and Play

As a former child prodigy playground designer, I liked this scene.

One of the most prominent features of working with small French children is the opportunity it affords to observe the behaviour and comportment of small children.  This is something which I have not really done since I was myself a small child, at which time my perspective was somewhat different.  More particularly, I get plenty of exposure (12 hours a week, to be exact) to life in elementary school – or as the French title of a 1988 Spike Lee film doesn’t put it, la vie en école primaire.

Now this, I know, does not sound very exotic; and you may rest assured, faithful and attentive reader, that I will not tax your patience with thousand-iron-tongued catalogues detailing my own pedagogic foibles or the delightful intricacies of classroom etiquette (and there came from Room 116 of Ecole Rex twenty cours préparatoire students bearing individual whiteboard-slates and markers…).  Yet, being back in primary school does produce an interesting kind of should-be deja-vu.  I have very happy memories of elementary school, but my recall of what the day-to-day life in the classroom was like is foggier – and being in these French classrooms lets me play at reconstructing my own childhood.  Of course, the fact that I was raised by wolves before being rescued by a magnanimous German monarch and encouraged to speak Hebrew makes any analogy between my childhood and that of my charges valid only on the vaguest level.

One feature of the chalk-dust coated life which caught my attention this week – and the subject of today’s uninformed and overly-portentous sermon – is the division between two models of classroom discipline evident in the schools in which I teach.  Some of the teachers with whom I work have adopted what I presume to be a more modern – at least for France – approach to classroom management.  Desks are arranged in groups, or islands, the students face, most of the time, in a variety of different directions, and the the entire class dynamic seems fairly relaxed – when I arrive at the door, the teacher is sometimes lecturing at the board, but as often is conducting the class from a seated, corner positions – or, less periphrastically, from behind his desk.  Discussion flows both ways – the kids are quizzed on questions, but also ask questions, or simply irrupt into the classroom’s airspace.  This way of arranging things is both both appealing and recognizable for me –  not least because of happy Annette St. hours spent thinking up historical narratives and board games centred around a conception of the desk group as a form of proto-nation-state (q.v. Wumprats).  When the system works, as it does in one classroom at my prosperous village school, it works very well – the class can be both attentive and easily and organically divided into smaller units for conversation, or for the bingo games that I take great delight in rigging.  Elsewhere, however, that way anarchy lies: in my other village classroom, as well as in my schools in the Viceroyalty of the Rio de la Plata, I often find myself able to command the attention of only one desk-cluster at a time – like guerrilla insurgencies in restive colonies, conversation is no sooner suppressed in one corner of the room, than it springs up in another.

In contrast, some of the other teachers in the Viceroyalty employ a far more traditional approach to classroom control.  Students sit in rows, only answer questions, don’t speak unless spoken to, and are regularly exhorted to answer faster and faster and faster.  As good Althusserian subjects, interpellated constantly by an ideological state apparatus, the children don’t even get to make their own nametags, but are issued them at their teachers’ whims.  These classes work, literally, like clockwork – the only possible form of dissent is a sullen silence.

The interesting, although perhaps stultifyingly obvious thing which lies behind these certainly stultifyingly obvious generalizations, is that in respect of ensuring that all the small French children learn some English, both systems produce identical results.  In the desk-nebulae classes, the least attentive students – or the least confident, or the quietest can simply disengage – any attempt to recover their attention would necessarily result in losing control of their excitable colleagues.  In the drill-sergeant classes, meanwhile, anyone who hesitates is simply left behind – as long they stay quiet, their more eager peers (who, like the ten year-old version of Your Author, spend the class valiantly trying to dislocate their arms from their shoulders) will gobble down all the questions.  It is a conundrum.

This observation, like all the best of its species, doesn’t in the end, have much of a point; nevertheless – and please brace yourselves for an Elegantly Chiastic Instance of Ring Composition Making Reference to The Title of the Entry – since text is play, it works.