To the Children I’ll Never See Again

To the three hundred children I teach each week, I’m writing you a single letter.

Dear Child,

I’m not good at goodbyes. I hardly ever say a ‘goodbye’ and mean it, but this week I’m going to say goodbye hundreds of times over. It won’t be a little ‘ta ta, I’ll see you soon’. When I say goodbye to you, I’ll never see you again.

You’re not good at goodbyes either. You don’t have any concept of time. The same part of you that gets overexcited each and every week when I turn up at your classroom door is that part of you that will skip away from our last meeting, oblivious. You have no concept of forever. At the very most, you’ve seen eleven christmases, which means a tenth of your life between each one. When it takes so long to get between autumn and spring, how can you have any idea of the length of time you’ve got left in your life?

In a way, it’s probably better like this. There’ll be no misty eyes, no surreptitious sniffling. We’ll say goodbye, and you’ll think I’m coming back, and by the time you realise I’m not I’ll be no more than a shadowy figure in your memory. All I can hope for is to be a happy one.

But here’s the thing that gets me, kid. I’ll never know what you become. You’re somewhere between six and eleven. You’ve got a whole load of living to do, and I won’t get to find out what happens. You’re one of three hundred mystery stories that are missing their endings. Your futures are hidden.

I did think that, at the very least, I’d know if you got famous. I’d see you on TV, I’d hear about you in the papers. Then I realised that, even if it does happen, I’ll never recognise you. How will I be able to link the tiny girl whose feet don’t reach the floor with the glamorous singer on stage? When I watch the politician striding around in his suit, will I automatically think of the boy who drew a french flag on his paper tie? I don’t even know your surname.

In a few years you’ll have changed beyond all recognition. You’ll be taller, stronger, faster. You’ll know more. You’ll be one step closer to your future, and one step further away from the child I knew. I only get a year of you, and I’m only a tiny chapter in your life.

So I suppose what I’m saying is that I wish you luck. I don’t know, and you don’t know, what direction your life is going to take. You’re still so young. But I would like to think that you will follow whatever your dream is, that three hundred lives that I’ve touched will end up with all their wishes coming true.

I hope you reach for the stars, kid.

And don’t forget me when you get there.

Yours,

Lydia

 

(Photo from Flickr, Kevin Steinhardt)

A Scandal at School and a Couscous for Kings

Shock! Horror! Disaster! In a tight knit community in the suburbs of Orléans, where families have to ask other families for news because they don’t speak french, rumours travel fast. The rumour mill was hard at work last week, spinning out a story about a terrifying new change in the school curriculum – gender theory.

This ‘theory’, according to the rumour, was that genders are unchangeable. If you are born a boy, you will grow up to be a soldier or a firefighter, marry a pretty woman, and spend your life dashing around being masculine and heroic. If you are born a girl, you will spend your teenaged years worrying about your makeup rather than your school results before marrying quickly and popping out children on a biannual basis. These are your only options. According to the rumour, this idea was about to make its way onto the school curriculum and be forced down the throats of all the impressionable six year olds there. And this, of course, will not do.

It seemed to take a lot of persuasion before the schools could convince the parents that this was categorically untrue. The first I heard of it was when large signs started to appear at the school gates, begging the parents not to listen to too many rumours. But whispers kept following us down the corridors, shuffling under the conversations at lunch time, and stalking the gates when I left. The signs were not successful.

I don’t know how they achieved it, but when I arrived at school on Thursday the atmosphere was unbelievably different. I puzzled through my lessons trying to work out what had changed, but it was only in my third lesson of the day that one of the teachers took me aside and explained things. Somehow, the gender theory rumour had been put to bed, and the parents had apologised. The pupils were being encouraged to be whoever they wanted to be, and the adults were talking to each other again. To top it off, the teacher explained, some of the parents wanted to make lunch for all of the staff, to show how sorry they were, and would I like to join in?

No word of a lie, it was the best school dinner I’d ever eaten. When I wandered down to the staff room, I accidentally joined a parade of huge plates, pots and pans, all mysteriously shrouded in tinfoil. We set the table, gathered everyone up, and then I sat down and waited for the great unveiling.

The mums had made a couscous fit for a king. A massive plate was topped with a pyramid of vegetables, criss-crossing over fluffy grains of couscous. Another plate had meat, a pan had a spicy sauce, and there was even a kettle full of mint tea. I piled my plate and tucked in.

It was lovely to really feel like a part of the school. The mums had made food for me, even though I only come in one day a week, and the teachers had made sure that the meal was for when I was there too. People came and talked to me because they wanted to – they wanted to hear about my experiences, or they wanted advice of what to see in London, or to catch up on my plans for the weekend. Good food and good company make for a wonderful lunch time, and I could barely have been happier. And when you think what brought the meal on, all I can say is thank god for rumours.

The Lost Boys of the Louvre

It all started with an innocent conversation at break time. I casually mentioned that, despite having gone to Paris whenever I felt rich, cultural or simply bored, I’d not yet been to the Louvre.

‘Oh’ says the well-meaning teacher, ‘we’re going next monday. Why don’t you come with us? It’ll be a great way for you to experience it, we’ve got a guided tour, you’ll have a wonderful time. You can be in charge of a group – I’ll give you a small one, easy children, they won’t get lost, it’ll be fun. You don’t work on a monday anyway, so really, what have you got to lose?’

Everyone knows that a speech like that is tempting fate. By mid afternoon on monday, as I was standing in the middle of the Louvre trying to keep forty french kids quiet while the other adults roamed the museum frantically searching for a lost child, I’d learnt the truth about school trips. They are not, and never will be, fun.

I got an inkling of this idea when, at six o clock on a dark, rainy morning, I was trying to get the children onto the bus. Calling for kids who got travel sick to sit near the front of the coach, I felt little Sophia come and take my hand. ‘I get sick a lot’ she said, ‘so can I sit next to you?’ I smiled wanly at her, agreed, and spent the journey playing happy families while chanting ‘please don’t be sick on me, please don’t be sick on me’ over and over in my head like a mantra.

Luckily, the children of école Louise Michel seem to be a pretty resilient bunch, and no one even grumbled as we drove through Paris towards the Louvre, gliding through row after row of Hausseman blocks with the kids squealing in excitement each time they caught a glimpse of the Eiffel Tour. Seeing as it’s one of the tallest buildings in Paris, this happened rather a lot. Still, it didn’t seem to drain their enthusiasm for it, and I nearly got excited to see it myself. Nearly. Then we plunged underground into the Louvre coach park, piled out, and our trip was ready to begin.

Except it wasn’t. With forty children, there is an incredible amount of organisation that needs to happen before anything fun. There are trips to the cloak room (which we managed to do an incredible four times during the day), toilet stops to make, and the obligatory photo in front of the pyramid. There were head counts to take, goûters to give out, and the inevitable confusion over tickets. We got to paris at about half past nine, but it wasn’t until eleven that we started our tour.

I can’t lie. Despite my complaints, the tour was fantastic. The children had been studying Islamic art, so the tour guide told them (and me) all about the origins of Islam, before talking in detail about some of the incredibly beautiful pieces that the museum had. My favourite was a sink that had belonged to a prince, and was covered in silver carvings of scenes of princely life – playing polo, hunting with leopards, and having picnic feasts in paradisiacal gardens. The kids unanimously decided that the coolest thing there was the large case full of intricately decorated swords and daggers. Although I listened to the tour guide’s description of them, I preferred the running commentary that came from Noah, one of the kids, full of scenes where knights jumped out from behind a curtain to stab unsuspecting victims in the throat, and lavishly illustrated with screams, gurgles, gasps, and rivers of blood.

It was after lunch that the nightmare happened. Right at the start of the day, as we walked past the information desk, the teacher in charge had turned to the children and said ‘If anyone gets lost, go to the information desk. Find someone who works here, ask them where it is, go straight there, and stay there. The Louvre is huge, and if you don’t, we might never find you, and you’ll be trapped wandering around the museum for ever and ever’. As the sea of anxious faces turned towards me, I quickly told them it definitely wasn’t going to happen, that they didn’t need to worry, and that I would always make sure that I knew where everyone in my group was. But that afternoon, as we were splitting up into groups, I felt a horrible sinking feeling in my stomach. We’d lost a kid.

I tried calling his name once more, in the hope that he’d been sitting somewhere where I couldn’t see him and he’d suddenly pop out of the shadows. No such luck. I knew he’d been with us just moments before, when we’d gone up the escalators to the second floor, so he couldn’t have gone far. Spinning around, I tried to catch a glimpse of him, but an eight year old child is too hard to spot in a sea of adults. The children were also starting to look worried. Noah, reproachful, turned to me and whispered ‘You promised that this wouldn’t happen’.

Of course, we found him again. He’d gone up the escalator with the rest of us and then, without thinking, turned and gone up the next one. After a stressful twenty minutes, he turned up sheepishly at the information desk and the visit went on. I got the impression that a kid went missing on pretty much every school trip that ever came to the museum. As we went back to the cloakroom for the final time, we came across another lost child, smiled at him, and directed him to the information desk. I’m assuming he got collected, but you never know. Maybe the teacher’s scare story was true, and tribes of lost children haunt the Louvre by night, wandering around the exhibits and stealing food from the cafes in the dark.

I was exhausted by the time we got back. A day of stressing, shouting, and playing endless games of I-spy in which the word always began with an L and was always Lydia was far too much for me. I’ve got an endless amount of admiration for the teachers who do this all the time, and who can’t say no. For me, once was definitely enough.

I promise not to keep any of these resolutions

Every year I resolve not to make resolutions. They’re difficult to keep, dispiriting to think about, and frankly if I kept them all I’d be so bloody perfect everyone would want to kill me. But on Tuesday I did a lesson about New Year’s Resolutions with my after school english club, and it got me thinking. What sort of resolutions should a language assistant make? Ones they can’t keep, if they’re anything like me. So without further ado I present to you all the resolutions that I should make, and that I can categorically say I wont:

I promise to learn the names of all the children I teach. This will never happen. I teach eighteen classes a week, with an average of about twenty children in each. Maths is not my strong point (in one memorable maths exam I labelled each question with ‘algebra’ or ‘division’ because there was no way I could actually complete the sum) but even I can work out that this equates to roughly 360 children a week. That is far too many names to remember, even once I disregard the numerous Mohammeds and Jeans. I currently have two strategies for dealing with children’s names. Strategy A involves asking them ‘What’s your name?’ before any other question, and disguising it as part of the lesson. This works for the younger children, but once they can all say their name without any issues a new technique is needed. Strategy B is where I remember the names of the funny or cute kids, like cheeky Jeff or the ever-smiley Amina, and say them loudly whenever possible. My plan is that this implies to the other kids that I know their names too, but I think they’ve seen right through me. After all, some of their names are so odd I don’t know if they’re telling me what they’re called or speaking in tongues. Maybe it’s both.

I promise to give every child an equal turn in whatever game we play. This is one that I’d really like to be able to do. I remember the feeling that swells up in the heart of every seven year old when you really really really really reeeeeally want to play the game, and the bell rings. When I first started this job I swore that I would never be the teacher who shut the book when it was just about to be your turn to read. A few weeks into it, I had to concede that not everyone could have a go every time, but I still wanted to get a balance overall. Now that I’ve been at it for a few months, I’ve become one of my childhood teachers who never let me have a chance (and yes, Mrs Flemming, I’m looking at you). I let the children pick who gets to go next, if someone’s taking too long to answer I move on, and if a kid doesn’t want to join in I don’t force the issue. I see it as a way of teaching my pupils one little extra lesson – that life isn’t fair.

I promise to remain grounded when around my students. If you’re looking for an ego boost, a language assistantship is the best thing that I can recommend to you. I’m getting uncomfortably used to being treated like a superstar. In the kitchen at work yesterday I walked past the window to the playground on my way to get a coffee. By the time I returned, a whole crowd of six year olds were waiting to glimpse me. In my subsequent lesson, they all greeted me with ‘Maîtresse, on t’a vue dans la cuisine!’ as if they’d spotted Beyoncé in the cleaning cupboard. I defy anyone to walk out of a primary school with a smaller ego than the one they walked in with. I’ve already asked people at home to start collecting pins to pop mine with once I get back.

I promise to plan perfectly tailored, individual lessons for every class. Just as every fingerprint is different, so is every class. Some love team games, while others work a lot better in an every-man-for-himself situation. Some need coaxing to say a single word, while others will not shut up no matter how much you shush them. Some are full of trouble makers, while others are brimming with goody two shoes. It’s clear that there’s no one size fits all method here, and I should make a new lesson plan for each and every class. On the other hand, like I said before, I teach 25 classes. I think that if I plan a new lesson for each year group I’m doing pretty well. It does lead to some frustrating situations, where a lesson that went perfectly for one class bombs in the next, but in general it works. And if the worst comes to the worst, there’s always ‘Heads, Shoulders, Knees and Toes’. I personally believe all the world’s problems would be solved if we could get the UN to sing ‘Heads, Shoulders, Knees and Toes’ together.

I promise not to rely on ‘Heads, Shoulders, Knees and Toes’. As my students would say, ‘Bahh… non’.

Heads, Shoulders Knees and Toes

Now that I’ve been teaching for a while, I’m sensing a pattern emerging in my lessons. A pattern of misunderstanding, blank looks and bemusement. To illustrate this, I thought I’d write down exactly the sort of thing that happens in one of my classes. After all, I could talk about the salon de gastronomie that we went to this weekend, or romanticise about the mornings spent browsing the antique markets, but that isn’t my daily life. This is.

It’s ten forty-five on a Tuesday morning, and I’m getting ready to start my CM1 class. This class of ten year olds has already diminished in size since I started, as one of the children has been excluded for kicking down a door and threatening the teachers. Strangely enough though, they’re one of my more enthusiastic classes, and I’m generally feeling quite good as I come in.

Me: Is everyone ready to start?

A sea of blank faces greets me.

Me: Alors, tout le monde est pret?

Nods of comprehension start to emerge. One or two of the brighter kids even manage a Yes! Instead of oui.

Me: Ok everyone, what did we do last week? Qu’est-ce qu’on a fait la semaine dernière? What did we do last week ?

A Kid : Err, on a fait comment dire bonjour ?

Me: Yes, but what did we learn in English? In English?

Silence all round.

Me: We learnt how to introduce ourselves. My name is Lydia, and I live in England. What’s your name?

I know for certain they can all answer this – they learn it in their equivalent of reception. I whirl around and pick on a boy at the back who thinks he’s getting away with chatting to his neighbour about football.

Me: What’s your name?

Boy: Errrrrrr my name eees Mohamed.

Me (Smiling inanely and giving him the thumbs up) Brilliant Mohamed! I’m very pleased to meet you! Now, where do you live?

Boy: Errrrrrr

Me: I live in England, where do you live?

Boy: I live… Orléans!

Me: Brilliant! But it’s in Orléans. I live in Orléans.

Girl from the back row: Mais maîtresse, vous etes anglaise!

Patiently, and in terrible French, I explain to her that, although I am English, it’s not really feasible to go back home to England after every day at school, and so for the moment I’m living in Orléans. She seems absolutely astonished.

Girl: Mais pourquoi?

It’s not really a question I can answer, so I go about trying to organise the main activity of the lesson. I’ve given them all a sheet with a conversation on it for them to read to each other in pairs, filling in the gaps with their own information. I get them started, but pretty soon hands are shooting up all over the classroom with question after question.

Boy (in French): What does ‘where do you live’ mean?

Girl (in French): What do I put in the gap here?

Boy (in French): How do you say Orléans in English?

Girl (in French): Miss, he won’t share the paper!

Boy (in French): I can’t read your handwriting!

Girl (in French): I can’t read your handwriting!

Whole class (in French): I can’t read your handwriting!

After five minutes of this, I’ve had enough. I read through my notes and rack my brains, but I’ve not got any other ideas of how to teach them today’s objectives. Finally, and in desperation, I turn back to the class with a strange strained grin on my face.

Me: Who knows ‘Heads Shoulders Knees and Toes’?

 

Maîtresse, Megabusses, and a Marathon

Last week was meant to be another observation week. It was meant to be simple – I would sit at the back of the classes, observe the students I would teach after Toussaint, and maybe just pop up to the front to say hello. Frankly, it was meant to be a doss.

But life often has a way of surprising you, and so do schools. Arriving at my first school on Tuesday, I followed a teacher into her classroom only to watch her sit at the back. As I looked questioningly at her she nodded encouragingly and I realised that I would be teaching her class. A class of CM2 (the oldest, moodiest kids) in a school that even the teachers called ‘difficult’, with absolutely no preparation. Brilliant.

In all honesty, it wasn’t as awful as I thought it would be. I have no idea if they understood anything I taught them, but I got them all playing Simon says and no one died, or cried, or screamed, or attacked another child. It did teach me though that preparation is incredibly important. In all my later classes, whether I was reading a storybook called ‘Hello, Goodbye’ to a class of littlies or teaching older classes about the difference between a jack-o-lantern and a pumpkin, I had already worked out exactly what I was going to do. This meant that even a warning that the oldest children would make me cry didn’t put me off too badly, and in the rest of the week not a single tear was shed.

This weekend, my dad was running a marathon in Amsterdam. The sentence alone is strange, let alone the concept – a few years ago I never would have believed that my dad would even run for the bus. But things change, and I was determined that I would go and cheer him on. This meant taking the megabus from Paris on an overnight trip, and I started out with trepidation. I was worried about missing the bus, about being able to sleep on it, and most of all about arriving in a foreign city without any real idea where I was. The first two weren’t a problem, but the bus driver didn’t even announce that we had arrived in Amsterdam when we stopped. I assumed that we were just there for petrol, and it took me a good five minutes to realise that the people getting off the bus weren’t planning on getting back on. Dazed and sleepy I managed to wander towards a tram stop and follow the herds of people to buy my ticket. In the rattling darkness of the early morning tram, I could have been anywhere.

I wasn’t anywhere though, and once I arrived at the central station I began to get my bearings a bit better. The thin, gabled houses leaning across the canals were beautiful, as was the sight of my mother waiting for me at the station. When you’re away, you are never really aware of your home and of the family that you’ve left, and it was only once I saw mum at the station that I realised how important family was to me. After six hours on a bus, they were almost as important to me as the cup of coffee that I desperately, desperately needed.

We spent the weekend in a wonderfully touristy way, visiting museums and having coffee in tiny cafes along the canals. After a month of forcing myself to make an effort and speak French, finding myself in a country where I didn’t speak a word of the language was strange. It was almost luxurious to speak to everyone in English (which, luckily, everyone I met could speak).  The best part of the whole weekend though was standing by the barriers in the Vondel park to watch the marathon in its last few miles. The elite runners came past without breaking a sweat, despite the 24 miles that they had already run, and pounded away out of sight. Almost two hours later, sweating and panting and struggling, came the rest of the runners, the normal people who, just for one day, were doing something incredible. As my dad ran past with everyone else, and we all shouted and cheered, a huge smile broke across his face. I can’t believe that someone who had just run almost an entire marathon still had any energy left for a smile, but every single one of those people were running just because they loved it. It was awe-inspiring. My dad finished in 3 hours and 57 minutes. And I’m so proud of him.

White Nights and Training Days

We primary school assistants are very lucky, because for us last week was training week. While those with lycées and colleges stood trembling in front of a class of surly teenagers, we spent two days sitting around the table and playing games. Teaching primary school children seems to mostly be about having fun. We learnt songs, played bingo and other really basic word games, and one memorable half hour was spent listening to our co-ordinator read us ‘Clifford the Big Red Dog’. I’d like to tell you that it wasn’t all fun and games, and that there were points spent doing real, hard work, but I’d be lying. I’m slightly worried that it gave me a false impression of my year though, as I’m pretty sure it won’t all be as easy as it currently seems.

In our free time, (and god knows that assistants have a lot of it) we have been looking for ways to vary our café culture routine. Last Saturday we left Orléans for Paris and its Nuit Blanche – a night where galleries and museums stay open late, where art shows fill the streets, and where everyone stays up very late and pretends to be more cultural than they really are. My highlights were wandering around the Pompidou at half past two, and a crazy fog installation in the Place de la Republique that made us feel like we were back in the middle of a revolution. While exciting, I’m not really sure that thick fog in the middle of a crowded city was such a good idea. When dark shadows loomed out of the mist shouting French to me, my heart leapt out of my chest and practically into the next street.

The French distain for Sundays meant that the first train back was at twenty to eight the next morning. I’ve never really been one for late nights, and I approached this marathon night out with quite a lot of trepidation. It turns out that the hard part wasn’t staying up late, but was speaking French at six in the morning. A brain as tired as mine trying to use a language that I still haven’t got a grasp on is not a recipe for success. I am beginning to find though that, in the daytime, I’m not struggling as much as I was. I can hold my end of a conversation if it’s instigated by someone else, and I even managed to crack a joke the other day. It might have been as weak as weak can be, but it’s a start.