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.

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