Three languages

The beach at Ile Rousse is white sand, but as narrow as a street. I kept expecting it to grow at low tide, but then fortuitously listened in on a geography lesson in Corsican and realized that the Mediterranean barely has any tides. Half the classes at my school are bilingual, so they are taught all their subjects in Corsican for the morning, and in French for the afternoon. If you spoke decent Italian (which I don’t) you would be able to understand Corsican, which is like Italian with a bizarre accent and a lot of dialect words. You don’t hear it spoken much in the streets, except by old people. I was talking to one teacher about how he has renounced violent nationalism in favour of the non-violent kind, and he said that it was a shame, because although the Corsican separatist movement keeps the language alive as a political statement, it has become a way to exclude other French people, rather than a positive language.

I realize I haven’t said much about teaching, mostly because it’s very repetitive. I have 12 hours a week, 9 in Ile Rousse, and 3 in the older school in Monticello. I wouldn’t say teaching small children is my vocation, but I enjoy it most days – it is satisfying to see their little faces light up when you explain that rainbows are named after a bow in French and English, because of the shape, or that you hEAR with your EARs. I have no idea if there is an actual etymological connection there, but anyway, they are quite easily impressed, which is soothing after three years of churning out essays for a somewhat more demanding audience.

When I’m teaching, most of the teachers sit in the back of the class and do marking, or wander off to do photocopies, but one woman, Mlle Agostini, likes to teach together. Her class is one of the bilingual ones, so it is a real mental workout for me because I will be speaking English to the kids, trying to use syntax and vocabulary that is closer to French while still being correct, sometimes resorting to French for certain instructions, which annoys Mlle Agostini, and watching the kids to see if they understand. She will then start translating my instructions into Corsican, so I am also listening to her, to check whether she understood the English correctly herself. The children will be asking me questions in French, and asking her questions in French or Corsican, and she will be talking to them in Corsican…she is really very nice, and that class is much better behaved because she is there to keep order, but it is exhausting!

The other day I did a really disastrous lesson with one of the rowdier classes. The idea was that they would draw faces, and then we would play ‘guess who’ by asking things like‘does she have blonde hair?’. Unfortunately they induced pre-teen drama by drawing hideous faces and naming them after their classmates, or in one case calling it ‘débile mentale’, which I don’t think went down too well with the teacher. All the kids think I’m a débile mentale because I can’t write in the French state-approved copperplate. The little ones take hours to even write the date, and they constantly consult their alphabet cards to remember what scrolls and swirls each letter requires. I would have thought that my printing on the board would have been simpler, but apparently not – they invariably have trouble reading it, and Mlle Agostini has taken to re-copying everything on the board for them, which is slightly demoralizing.


The French school system is amazingly regimented, compared to what I remember at primary school: the children all stand up when a teacher comes into the room, a few teachers do quite a lot of shouting and will happily say ‘this whole class is terrible, they are badly brought up, you should just give them a test to do in silence every time.’ Even after several lessons with my lax attitude to penmanship, the children still ask incessantly what colour to write in, because there are obviously strict and invariable rules about it. It only adds to my débile mentale status when I tell them that they can write in felt tip if they want, I couldn’t care less. I think most of them see me as an amusing freak.

I sometimes feel like a bit of a fraud, because I frankly have no clue what I am doing, and just devise my own syllabus according to whatever seems most interesting. But frankly it’s not rocket science and I think the kids mostly enjoy the classes, if only because they don’t do proper work in them (several have explicitly said this to me, in the most charming way possible!). It’s quite touching how affectionate little kids can be – they will say they ‘adore’ English lessons, or come up to me and tell me inconsequential little anecdotes that I don’t fully understand. I think one little boy in the class for kids with learning disabilities absolutely loves me – he always does the bises, even when I am carrying a full tray of food at lunchtime, and just looks so happy in class, and tries so hard. One kid today asked me what ‘good morning’ meant, and seemed bowled over when I told him. ‘Tomorrow, I can say good morning papa!’ he said, and then looked even happier when I reminded him that he had just learnt what papa was in English, and went off muttering ‘good morning dad’. Even when it seems like they aren’t learning much, I think having a happy, encouraging first experience with a foreign language must be doing them some good.