Memoir of a Multi-Passionate Entrepreneur, OR How Time Traveler Tours Came to Be, Ch 10

The Meaning of “No”

When we learned that we would be moving to France, I was ecstatic. I had lived in Central America in countries torn apart by civil wars, lacking in even the most basic of services. I had lived in China when the majority population had never laid eyes on a westerner – much less a blond one – and where everything you consumed, and I mean everything, needed to be boiled. To death.

I had never lived in a developed nation other than the US. And I assumed that Paris, being closer to my home culture and way of life than any of my previous expatriate posts, would be easy. Except for a few language classes, I didn’t even prepare. I figured if I could do China, I could do France. I had this.

But culture can be deceiving. Paris was the hardest move I ever made. And one of the most difficult things to figure out was what the French really meant by “no”.

In China, the idea of ‘face’ – one’s honor, dignity, reputation – is of utmost importance. You do everything to keep another person’s ‘face’ intact or suffer the consequences. And one of the ways that’s done is to never directly respond to a request with the word “no”, even if “no” is the answer; indeed, especially if “no” is the answer.

Many a cross-cultural blunder has resulted from a westerner understanding “yes” simply because a “no” was not proffered. Expressing “no” without saying “no” becomes a kind of linguistic dance that some cultures are more practiced at than others, China being at one extreme, the US at another. During our time in China, Jim and I got pretty good at learning to hear “no” as well as learning how not to say it.

But French culture is different yet again. “No” is always the first response – or I should say “non!” – and being born in a culture where “no” does mean “no”, it can really sting to hear it.

Our first experience of this was shortly after Loo’s ill fated “orientation” at school. Realizing that she had been admitted into the wrong class, we requested a meeting with the headmistress toute de suite. We entered the meeting wearing our North American cultural faces, ready to communicate as equals to seek a friendly, collaborative solution to what we were certain would be a problem shared between us and the school.

“It’s clear that a mistake has been made,” I began, “most likely our own,” I said to preserve the headmistresses’ face. “Loo has been admitted into the wrong class and we would like to see her advanced to the next year group without delay.”

“Non.” Was the simple, curt reply.

Ouch.

“But there are children in her current class that are so much younger that they haven’t started reading yet, while Loo is reading at a level well beyond her age. I’m sure we can all agree that in order for her to be happy and adjust well to life here, she really needs to be with her peers, both in age and ability.”

“Non. She’s fine where she is. I’ve spoken to all her teachers.”

Dashed assumption #1: We didn’t perceive the same problem.

Dashed assumption #2: We were not equals, and the other side made no bones about asserting that she held the power. What’s more, she was dug in, intransigent.

Conflict. I saw red.

“But how can they know? It’s only the first days of school. No one knows our Loo as well as we do.”

Face challenged on both sides. Conflict escalated.

“It’s their job to know. Are you questioning the professionalism of my team?”

Dashed assumption #3: The parents’ opinion matters.

Jim stepped in then, in an attempt to dial back the steam valve and reveal once again the common problem to be solved, together.

“Let me give you an example. Loo’s homework assignment last night was to trace the dotted outlines of the letters of the alphabet, each letter 25 times. But Loo’s been writing for more than three years. She’s filled several notebooks with stories of her own invention that she illustrates herself. The English and French alphabets are the same. There is no reason for her to do the same work she did as a five year old.”

“Yet, her French teacher tells me she does not the like manner in which Loo holds a pen.”

Dashed assumption #4: The education of children is the work of the school and family working as a team.

Jim reflects on this comment for a minute. Decides to treat it as a non sequitur. And continues in his original line of argument:

“If she stays in her current class, we all run the risk of her becoming bored. As an educator, you know perhaps better than we do that when kids get bored, they act out. Especially smart kids. Loo needs to be challenged. This class will not challenge her.”

“How can you say that she will not be challenged? She will be learning French! This is not a challenge? I assure you that all the children in Loo’s class have very impressive dossiers.”

Dashed assumption #5: The whole child is more important than test scores.

“That may well be, but they are younger than her by more than two years in some cases, and haven’t learned to read and write yet. Their test scores are not important in this discussion. What is right for Loo, a real child and individual, is.”

Stalemate. Faces flushed. Hearts racing.

Silence.

“Well, we do often move the children around in the first weeks of school if we feel a mistake as been made. Why don’t we give it two weeks. Then we’ll see.”

A concession? A step toward “yes”? Did we win?

We felt that we did. We felt that the headmistress moved closer to our point of view in that moment. We smiled and shook hands and expressed our thanks. We left the meeting with the understanding that we had been told “yes”, but in time.

Because in time surely they would see that Loo was indeed in the wrong class. That is, if she was willing to reveal herself to them.

But she wasn’t. The teachers were mean, she said. They refused to let us speak, she relayed. I get through my work quickly, then they make me sit and wait for the others. Why won’t they give me more work to do? she asked.

How could they know the true child if she did little more than trace the shapes of letters from a workbook in perfect silence? How could they discern her ability level without asking her to take on additional tasks?

Loo grew bored. And the more bored she grew, the angrier she became. One teacher repeatedly slapped her hand, forcing her to hold her pen in a different way. This made her handwriting messy, resulting in bad marks in penmanship. Marks were revealed publicly in front of the other kids, who all snickered, unchecked.

Then there was the short writing assignment in which Loo spelled the word "color" the US way, without a "u". She received a "0" for her effort.

Then there was the day she attempted to speak in French, but not knowing one vocabulary word, she inserted its English equivalent instead. Rather than congratulate Loo for trying, then give her the missing word and ask her to repeat the sentence, she was made to sit in the time out chair for speaking Franglais.

“I’m never speaking French again,” she declared. “I hate French people,” she fumed.

She started to develop severe stomachaches every morning, just five minutes before leaving for school. She’d cry and double over, clutch her belly, writhe on the floor. Her fussing would of course delay our departure. Then, once out the doors, she’d cry all the way to the school gates, “I’m g-g-going to be l-l-late and they’re g-g-going to y-y-yell at me!”

Upon the end of our two-week trial period, we took another meeting with the headmistress. “The situation is dreadful,” I said. “She’s trying her best but she’s bored and growing more unhappy every day. She really needs to be moved up a year grade without any further delay.”

“Non,” said the headmistress, “it’s too late now. The other class has already bonded as a group. Loo will just have to stay where she is. I've watched her on the playground through my office window. She seems perfectly fine.”

We felt duped, lied to, placated, then betrayed. The headmistress never had any intention of moving Loo, of doing what was best for our child. She played us. And no one likes to be played.

“What did we do wrong,” I subsequently asked another US expat who had been in France forever and was a veteran mom at the school.

“You were too American, too polite. You must never take “no” as “no” in France. The French typically start there. And then expect you to duel with them, cleverly, and without losing your temper – unless you absolutely have to. You must convince them, even bully them, until you get them to “yes”. That’s what they respect. You have to fight back. Otherwise, they'll assert their power, deserved or not, and walk all over you.”

So we’d blown it with our North American expectation that collaboration was the key to problem solving. We should have demanded, bullied, gone over the headmistresses’ head. But we didn’t. And now it was too late.

It was time to find another school for Loo.

Image courtesy of www.tomandjerryonline.com/.

Back To School -- "La Rentrée" -- Special –- Beware Mme la Guillotine 50% Off!

At Time Traveler Tours and Tales (coming soon!) we aim to revolutionize educational travel and historical scholarship by bringing the very best in non-fiction interactive storytelling to the mobile and tablet formats.

How do we do it?

By offering young people a “way in” to history in the most engaging, compelling, and meaningful way we know how:

through the stories of those who made it,   flavored with interactivity. 

History through Story and Games,

in the Palm of your Hand.

Storytelling is the oldest human art form. Everyone loves a good yarn. And we believe that history is best approached, understood, and enjoyed through the eyes of those who lived it.

Each of our Tours (and soon, our Tales) take time-travelers back through the ages with a narrator whose actions helped shape their time. In telling their stories, our protagonists reveal the passions, breakthroughs, secrets and scandals of the eras, providing a vivid contextual understanding of their experience and the importance or their historical moment.

Beware Madame la Guillotine

-50% for Back 2 School

*  *  *  *  *

Teachers and Librarians love it!

School Library Journal

Top 10 2011 App

Teachers with Apps

Top 10 2011 Tried & True Classroom App

World Youth, Student & Educational Travel Confederation

Top 12 2012 Educational Travel App

Memoir of a Multi-Passionate Entrepreneur, OR How Time Traveler Tours Came to Be, Ch 9

Culture Clash

Amongst the arm-long supply list and brief class agenda included in Loo’s school welcome packet was a flimsy piece of paper no bigger than a business card, inviting us to join the Headmistress for an orientation the day before the official start of school. We might have missed it completely if it hadn’t slipped out from the documents and drifted its way to the floor.

Despite lacking any sense of seriousness or professionalism from our North American point of view, the little invitation gave us all a jolt of excitement and optimism. With the start of school, our new life would finally begin after an unnecessarily long build-up. Loo would have structure and friends in her life once again. (She’d had quite enough of hanging out with mom, even if it did mean learning French from a boring book.) And I could get to work unpacking the boxes that had arrived just moments after our return from Sancerre.

And so, without any consideration that our cultural understanding of what is meant by “orientation” might be flawed, we all dressed up and set off for school on the appointed day, at the appointed time.

The school called itself “international” and a bilingual international school at that. It was thus very keen to include Anglophone children. However, we were to learn, without any warning, that the French administrators of this highly reputed institution held a very different interpretation of “orientation”, and one that did not jibe with the consciousness of anyone else who showed up that day.

It turns out this particular brand of orientation, though never stated, did not include parents. The school personnel met us outside the given address, promptly took our children and shut the door. Without so much as a kind word, they left me, Jim and two-dozen other parents, all dressed to the nines, standing there agape on the sidewalk.

A glance at the rest told me they were mulling over the same questions: We do we do now? What time will our children re-emerge? When are we to be oriented? Some shifted back and forth on their high heels. Others pounded their rolled up newspapers against a leg, puffing out hot air. Still others just stood staring at the door, their jaws threatening to hit the pavement below. I stepped forward, balled up my fist, and pounded, hoping to get the attention of the adults who’d just turned their backs on us.

Bam. Bam. Bam. The door rattled in its hinges, giving of a satisfying resonating thud.

I stepped back and waited. The door, a monstrous windowless metal affair that looked better suited to locking up prisoners than children, opened outward again, but only slightly, and the head of the primary school Headmistress peeked through. “Oui, can I help you?”

“Yes. You invited us here to be oriented. We all took time off to be here today and we have many questions. We don’t even know what time to pick up our children!” I said.

“Orientation is for the students, only. You need not worry. We’ll take good care of them. Come back in two hours,” she said, and started to escape back through the door, closing it as she went.

I stopped it with my foot. “But we have questions. Lots of questions. As headmistress of an international school I’m sure you can understand that we’re all a bit overwhelmed. We came to be oriented and we’re not leaving until we are.”

She looked at me dumbfounded, clearly unused to being challenged. “Just wait here. I’ll get my secretary.”

“No. We want to talk to you. You are the head of the primary school, are you not?” Now I was just plain mad.

Defeated, she invited us into a grimy and sad-looking gym just beyond the gray metal door. It was as drab and nondescript, as Loo would later report, as the dreary, undecorated classrooms within.

Not a chair was offered, not a hand extended. We all circled around the diminutive, misanthropic head of school and barraged her with questions. What time should the kids arrive in the morning? What do we do in the event of illness? How does lunch work? How much homework is to be expected? Is after-school care offered? Basic stuff. We all knew the philosophy of the school – that the kids would transition from majority instruction in English to majority instruction in French over the course of the first year and be mainstreamed with their French peers by year two. We all knew the reputation of the school – that it was the best in Paris and impossible to get into, so if your child is offered a place, be proud and grab it. But we didn’t know things like dress code and pick up procedures and the cost of school lunch. It was weird.

Jim and I bided our time. As it happens, we both had the same immediate observation regarding our daughter and were thus thinking the same question. However, it was a very personal one, of no consequence to the group. So we waited until our so-called orientation began to break up, then pulled the Headmistress to one side.

“What do we do if we’ve applied for the wrong year group?” we asked.

It was clear to us the minute we arrived with Loo. She stood a head and sometimes shoulders above the rest. The youngest, we learned during the group chat, was six and hadn’t begun to read yet. Loo was three months shy of nine and reading many years above her grade level.

“Yes, that does happen from time to time,” the Headmistress stated. “Each national system starts children at a different age, so sometimes parents do make mistakes during the application process.”

Was she really blaming us? I couldn’t help myself: “And knowing this, do you not check the birth date of each child on every application in order to catch the error and rectify it before school begins?”

Silence. She considered. She’d parried.

“Of course we do everything we can to ensure that each child is in the right class. I assure you that Loo is well placed. She isn’t even the smartest child in the group.”

“How would you know that?” Incredulous at the stupidity of the comment, my voice rose several decibels. “You haven’t even met her yet!”

Here was the big take-away from that fateful day:

• Loo was admitted into the wrong glass.
• French people, generally speaking, find it very hard to admit mistakes.
• When a mistake is made, the worst thing you can do is to point it out.

Loo came out of this session looking much like we felt, a wee fawn trapped in the headlights of an on-coming Mac truck. Though only eight years old, she’d been in school for six. For her, school had always been fun - a colorful, lively adventure, full of books and art supplies and math games and people who enjoyed the company of children. Back in Brooklyn, she insisted on dressing for school the night before so she could wake up and go. She hated to be late; refused to admit when she was sick so she wouldn't miss it; and hid when I came to fetch her at the end of each day. That’s how much she loved school.

Or once used to. Back in our clutches we learned from her that the orientation was meant to teach kids such school rules as when to use a black pen versus a blue, green or red one; where, exactly, on a page you should begin your note taking; how many centimeters, exactly, you are required to indent; that the paper covered in squares was meant for math assignments, only, and that math work should begin on a specific square at the top left or, if begun in the wrong square, even a perfect paper will be ripped up and receive a 0 grade; at what classroom desk from amongst the several neat rows you would be expected to sit for the remainder of the year; and that you must never, ever speak in class except when called upon. Finally, that Loo was made to sit in the time-out chair because she failed to turn up at orientation with her school books and supplies, even though the school never indicated that she should.

We also learned that there were no books in the classroom, that children in Loo’s year group were not granted library privileges, indeed that reading books at this age was neither encouraged nor advised.

“You mean I can’t read Harry Potter 6 when it comes out?” she asked, doe-eyed. She’d already poured through the 500+ page 5^th installment several times, a very capable and avid reader. And I felt at odds, like I was sanctioning disrespect of authority for the first time in her little life, when I said of course she could. It would be our little secret.

This was going to be a very, very different year. For all of us.

Image by Franzfoto, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

5 Perfect Days in Bordeaux Wine Country

 ...This is where our adventure began, in the famed walled city of Saint Émilion, in the middle of Bordeaux wine-country. Charming and atmospheric, with layers of living history going back through the ages, it is a “must see” for visitors to the region.

READ MORE...

 Please Vote

Time Traveler Tours

for WYSTC's Top 2012 Travel App

CLICK HERE

Vote Time Traveler Tours to Win the WYSTC 2012 App Yap & Win a Free Download of Beware Mme la Guillotine

 

That's right, you heard it here first.

But head on over to Julie Hedlund's blog to learn how to play.

Don't delay! Only 7 more days left!

Have Fun!

Awesome Paris Eats for Under 20EUR

GotSaga Strikes Again!

Want to know how to eat well in Paris and not break the bank? You need go no further than this GotSaga guest post by Sarah Towle.

Please Vote

Time Traveler Tours

for WYSTC's Top 2012 Travel App

Click Here!

Memoir of a Multi-Passionate Entrepreneur, OR How Time Traveler Tours Came to Be, Ch 8

Initiated: Our Trial with French Education Begins

Imagine that you’d just ripped your eight-year old away from the life she knew and loved and then informed her that she’d be spending the summer holidays going to language school with mom. How do you think she’d react?

If you said, not well, you’d be exactly right…

(Add to this already dubious equation that school happens to be in France, and you get double the trouble. But more on this anon.)

…for as those of you with kids will know, when their world isn’t right, and they aren’t sure why, and they can’t find the words to express how they feel, they act out. And that’s what happened with Loo.

So while I was trying my darnedest to make the best of a difficult situation, to keep a smile on my face, and to brainstorm creative solutions, Loo was folding further and further in on herself like a child’s origami fortune teller, begging me to provide the answers to a multitude of questions that she could not yet articulate. This was helping neither my confidence nor my credibility as a mother. Thus, the former mother-daughter dream team – and we had been just that – were plunging ever deeper into a downward spiral.

Sancerre was going to save us!

We arrived at our apartment at the summit of this ancient hilltop town filled with hope for good days ahead. The place was lovely, one vast room richly decorated with red velvet drapes trimmed with gold piping. The ceiling was so high it could have accommodated LeBron James comfortably. The new towels and sheets were luxuriously soft, as if they'd never been used before. The galley kitchen was appointed with all the appliances and utensils necessary to prepare three square meals for an entire family, despite its being intended for only two. And the views out the windows, over the vineyards crawling with ripening fruit on one side and the medieval stone town on the other, were exquisite.

But we quickly discovered the reason why this apartment remained unused this deep into the summer: It was in a bell tower. The bell tolled to hour every hour on the hour, splitting our head open with each ring, even at night.

Then there was the weather. It was cold – even colder than Paris – and gray. All plans to spend our free time from school lounging by the glorious Sancerre community pool, located on the banks of the Loire River, remained locked up in our shared chest-of-drawers along with our swim suits.

The only activities left to us besides learning French were wine-tasting, which Loo could not and did not want to do, and cooking. So we cooked a great deal, availing ourselves to the fresh produce of the nearby farmer’s market as well as to the frequent cooking classes sponsored by our language school. We did visit a goat cheese farm in nearby Chavignol, which is known far and wide for its chevre, and went to a local cultural festival one weekend. These were the fun moments.

But school itself was not. It was boring, especially for Loo. As a linguist and language teacher, I was dumb-founded, daily, at the myriad ways in which the curriculum, in general, and our teacher, in particular, missed opportunities for interactive learning. Though I threw myself into the exercise, happy to be doing something productive, I chaffed at the teaching methodologies, which were devoid of any real context and completely inappropriate for a child. Loo became progressively more turned off by the rote learning of pattern drills set up in the fake dialogues proposed by the school’s one-and-only workbook.

It’s stupid! She’d say, pushing the book away from her when we’d hunkered down of an evening of homework assignments.

I’m never going to talk to people like these characters or have conversations like this about their dumb kites. Why can’t they teach us real stuff? Why do I have to learn French from a stupid book?

Okay, so Loo wasn’t always as inarticulate as I might have led you too believe, above. And she was right. She was also angry and spared no opportunity to direct her frustrations at me.

I empathized, but I also insisted we stick with it, assuring her that real school would be better, that the teachers in Sancerre – although very nice people – simply lacked formal training in how to teach kids. I promised her that her new school in Paris, chock full of teachers dedicated to teaching kids her age, would have much more sensible books and materials.

So Loo suffered through the workbook exercises and by the end of our stay in Sancerre, she’d completed the first-level book and actually felt proud of the accomplishment. On the way out of town, we made a great ceremony of chucking the book in the town’s paper recycling bin.

We returned to Paris ready to turn a new page (pun intended), and there, waiting in a pile of unopened mail, was a welcome packet from Loo’s new school. It contained a list of books and supplies to be purchased prior to her first day. Guess what title appeared among the list of textbooks needed for French? That’s right. The same dreadful workbook she had just completed. The one she hated. The one she’d gleefully thrown away. The one her French class would be working through for the next several months, until the winter holidays.

I am NOT doing that again! She exclaimed. This did not bode well, neither for her success in school nor for my parental credibility.

We had no way of knowing it at the time, but our trial with the French education system was already well under way.

 Please Vote

Time Traveler Tours

for WYSTC's Top 2012 Travel App

CLICK HERE

Ginger & Nutmeg Give Beware Mme la Guillotine 4 Thumbs Up!

Calling all history buffs!

Nutmeg introduces you to a real find:

Beware Madame la Guillotine, A Revolutionary Tour of Paris,

"by Time Traveler Tours, an educational tourism start-up that is capturing worldwide attention".

 Click here for complete review...

Top 5 Popular Paris Picnic Places (where you can actually sit on the grass)

ANOTHER HOT SAGA FOR YOU!

GotSaga does it again! No, wait a minute that was Sarah writing for GotSaga. Silly me.

Check it her sage advice here.

Memoir of a Multi-Passionate Entrepreneur, OR How Time Traveler Tours Came to Be, Ch 7

Culture Shock Sets In!

As July began its transition toward August, we awaited the good news with mounting anticipation. Finally, the call came. Our container had arrived! And right on schedule, too. Our belongings were now at the French port of Le Havre just north of us in Normandy. All that was left was to schedule delivery.

Then the bad news: Delivery could not be made for another month – maybe more – as there were no workers available until September.

Everyone in France was off on the typical month-long summer vacation… even the employees of an enormous international moving concern.

Quoi? I was incredulous.

I tried brainstorming solutions: There must be some people left in France who would be thrilled to make a little extra money in August.

Non, madame.

I tried suggesting options: Perhaps you could rally some English or Belgian members of the company to do an additional job on their next sally to France?

Ça ce n’est pas possible, madame.

I even tried bullying. I ranted about the importance of customer service, about keeping your company promises to your clients. Our agreement was delivery upon arrival in France, I shouted. But I only got this in reply:

C’est les vacances, madame. C’est la France!

I slammed down the phone. I stomped around, wondering at the top of my lungs how a country that only worked 11 months a year could survive in the global world economy. How dare they confuse our plans this way? We’d come to Paris early, for the summer, so that we could set up our new home, so that Loo to be settled before starting a new school in September. Had I known we were going to be dealt this hand, I’d’ve stayed the summer in upstate New York. I’d’ve given Loo a “normal” summer if sun and fun with friends, not imprisoned her in a cavernous, echoey, drab, unwelcoming apartment during the coldest season on record with nothing but a single air mattress for the entire family to sit on and only her mother to play with.

How was I to keep this kid occupied? We were supposed to be shopping and scrubbing and creating a home together. Now what were we going to do? During our last sortie, to a raved-about children’s play park called the Jardin d’Acclimatation, I’d been robbed. My pockets picked clean by a friendly-seeming group of teens offering to help point us in the right direction when we’d gotten clearly lost. Camera? Gone. Wallet? Gone, credit cards, drivers license and all. Metro passes? Gone. I didn’t even have money to get us back to our neighborhood again.

This is not what I’d planned for. This is not what I’d expected. It wasn’t fair! It was wrong! All wrong!

I eventually tired of raging and succumbed to crying until my shoulders sagged and I could weep no more. Then, I pulled myself together. I decided that as we were now in France, we might as well do as the French do. We would leave Paris for August as well.

A few days later, Loo and I were on our way south by high-speed train to the medieval hilltop town of Sancerre. We picked it not for its wines, although we were already quite familiar with their crisp and flinty summer whites. We picked it because of a language school there that catered to families. They just happened to have room for two in their current session.

Jimmy already spoke French, sort of. He’d spent his primary school years at the Lycée Français in New York, and the language was coming back to him, a little stronger and more fluent every day. But Loo and I spoke not one word, and she was soon to start school in French.

Me, I just needed to take back control of my life.

It was all very odd, you see. I had roughed through my early 20s in one dicey Brooklyn neighborhood after another, chasing the lowest rents while starting my adult life as a community educator without a penny to my name. I had spent years working all over Central America in some of the poorest places on earth and under some of the most arduous conditions. I had lived in China when it was just opening to the west, when it was still rare and exotic to see a towhead, like me. I’d trekked the Himalayas and hosteled through Europe, and I'd loved and relished each and every experience. I'd given birth in a Chinese hospital without heat in the middle of winter, for goodness sakes! I thrived on changed. I was not easily flustered by a good challenge, quite the contrary.

Now we were in Paris, France, capital of the western world, queen of the developed nations, center of culture and civilization! This move should have been easy, a piece of cake. But it was very quickly and unexpectedly proving to be the hardest move I’d ever made.

The culture shock was profound, despite being closer to my home culture than any other place I'd ever been. I needed to be strong for my daughter, yet I felt infantilized at every turn.

I needed to be able to communicate.

So Loo and I picked up our shattered pieces and went to Sancerre. We went to spend the month of August in school.

Image: Sancerre in 1657.