Last week, I returned to Bellovacum after two weeks of vacances d’hiver, a period of time in which all French teachers go skiing, along with many small French children (and, presumably, their larger French parents). Less fortunate small French children remain home watching television, although at least this year they were able to watch skiing at the Winter Olympics: the imaginations of my students seem to have been particularly captured by the biathlon. The French often refer to les jeux Olympiques by their initials, and my trip to my home and native land have encouraged both my students and colleagues to ask me about “les geo”; my blank stares in response have, I feared, gone some way to undermining my cultural authenticity.
Although this is now the third time I have come back here from a vacation (and there’s still one more to go!) this has been the most defamiliarizing homecoming yet, perhaps because spending two weeks amid the old scenes and routines of Montreal has restored some of Bellovacum’s novelty. The march of the seasons also seems to have accelerated in my absence: the days have lengthened enough that it’s now always worthwhile to roll up my blinds, and during the sun’s two brief appearances last week one could clearly catch the scent of spring.
This same sense of newness is particularly noticeable in the classroom. On Thursday, for example, while teaching a class of seven and eight year-olds and still possibly experiencing the hallucinatory effects of le décalage horaire, I was suddenly overcome by an epiphanic realization of how strange a place primary school actually is. It is an oddly coercive environment, in which what are essentially administrative punishments – being made to stand behind in another teacher’s classroom, deprived of recess, or hauled before the director – take on an awesome juridicial force, and in which the entire enterprise of teaching sometimes seems best understood as a struggle to force children to attend to their better natures, to their curiosity and eagerness, in the face of their evident preference for talking and playing amongst themselves. Perhaps what was most startling was my realization that this has all come to seem perfectly natural to me, that in six months I too have come to think in a currency of lost recrés and punitions served. At the same time, because I will have no real long-term involvement in my students’ education, my time in the classroom still feels like competitive play: each lesson is a game, in which, if my students end up learning something, I can declare myself the winner.
Friday brought another reminder of the personality-altering power of classroom discipline over small French children. At École L’Arlésienne, the teacher-cum-drill sergeant of my first class has decided to divide the class in two each week, so that we can work more flexibly in small groups. Despite my initial laid-back scepticism about traditional French scholastic authoritarianism, I’ve come to relish the angelic regimentation of this class, particularly as the remainder of each Friday afternoon usually leaves me feeling like Yeats’ falconer. In other circumstances I would have been concerned about this strategy of divide-and-rule, which the other teachers at L’Arlésienne have also tried, with near-apocalyptic results; this class, however, seemed so dutiful, so eager, that I couldn’t quite believe that their attentiveness derived purely from fear and oversight. And yet, no sooner had the teacher departed with the other half of the class and with her dire warnings still hanging in the air, than an insurrectionist cell of boys declared itself in a chorus of complaints, recriminations, snitching and gros mots. Suddenly aspects of the class of which I’d thought nothing became meaningful: that’s why little Yann always sits by himself at the front of the class, that explains adorable Ahmed’s special seat in the back corner. As one boy whined, another sulked, and a third hit both of them over the head with an empty water bottle, I found myself wishing that the ideological state apparatus would hurry up and get this whole interpellation business over with.