Chapter 5, in which The Author makes more ſtrained analogies to a continent which will remain nameleſs and in which Small French Children comment upon his Height for the Firſt Time

Yesterday, at Ecole L’Arlésienne in the Viceroyalty of the Rio de la Plata, your correspondent found himself in the midst of a conflict reminiscent of the Guerra de las Malvinas.  The disruption occurred as a group of Small French Children and I were sitting in a circle on the floor, practicing our pronouns.  As ever, the children were responding with varying degrees of attentiveness – one of the males of species had already been banished to the corner of the class for refusing to stop breakdancing in the middle of circle, and his fellow boy children were either talking to each other constantly or becoming distressed by the continuing antics of the breakdancing exile.  The girls, in contrast and accordance with stereotype, were, by and large, being attentive and diligent – although one of them kept sneaking peeks at a picture book about ponies.

This pedagogical idyll, sadly was not long for our earth.  The breakdancer was soon lying on his stomach across several desks; the other children clamoured to be allowed to go report him to their teacher.  One boy cast aspersions on another’s grandmother’s maidenly honour – within seconds the injured party was pursuing the offender around the room and alternating fits of crying with the overturning of desks.  Two of most soft-spoken and studious girls in the class were demonstrating heretofore unsuspected capabilities of both vocal projection and English expression by screaming at the rest of the class to be quiet.  Others – the most eager collaborators of both sexes – pursued the combatants in the hopes of being the one to drag them off to their punishments.  Another girl was in tears, sure that she would never learn any English.  The picture-book reader immersed herself among her ponies.  The break-dancer did handstands.  Just like in Panama in 1989, peace could only be restored by application of external force to remove the malefactor – in the form of the teacher returning to the room to carry the brawlers off to be imprisoned in the salle informatique.

By contrast, my post-recré class was a model of moral rectitude; I was working outside with small groups, and only one malefactor had to be deported to the Devil’s Island of the classroom.  We passed the hour in pleasant comparative religious study, making sheep and turkey noises to illustrate the differences between Thanksgiving and Eid.  Near the end of the class, the conversation turned to that deep and challenging question: How Old Are You?  I informed the children of my age.  They seemed surprised.  “You’re young,” they wondered – “and tall for your age!”

No turkey, but at least one strike

Today, I'm very excited to report, I had my first French strike. This was a good kind of strike as it did not involve the disruption of the transportation services, but instead the disruption of primary school classes, which I thus did not need to attend.

But my pleasure at this particular grève does not really come from missing work, which I actually quite enjoy and don't, anyways, have very much of.  Instead, it derives from the satisfaction of how routine and almost unconfrontational the strike was.  First, it's only going to be one day long.  There's quite a bit of this in France - the trains, the buses, the schools, will stop for a day, just to keep the government on its toes.  The whole thing is thus quite a bit more relaxing than a strike back home - there's no worrying about how much longer things will go on until the garbage gets picked up - you just have to wait out the day and things will go back to normal.  Second, the strike is optional.  Only about 30% of primary school teachers went on strike today.  Small French children still went to school.  Similarly, during recent SNCF strikes, between half and a third of all trains continued to run.  It all seems very reasonable.

I'm sure that I'm looking at French labour dynamics through rose-tinted glasses.  Longer, or even indefinite strikes probably do happen, which means that additional one-day strikes over political, as opposed to contractual matters, must get really annoying.  But today's strike, and the run-up to it, still had undeniable charm.  For the last week and a half, there's been a sign-up list on Ecole Rex's staffroom white-board.  For a long time, only one teacher was signed up.  Lunchtime conversation often followed the template "So are you striking?" "No, I have too much to do with my class."  Other teachers seemed to be waiting to hear from the school's director whether or not their joining the strike would be inconvenient.  And last week, special forms appeared, which teachers intending to strike had to fill out and submit to the Inspection (their employer) 48 hours before walking off the job.  Only last night did I get an email suggesting that, since there might not be any classes to teach, I shouldn't worry about showing up to work.

It all seems very satisfyingly French.

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.