Today in French class I launch the first lesson I will not finish. Only three blocks left (per section) before the end of the year, and then their teacher is coming back. Fifteen long weeks are coming to a close. “I will not see the end of this lesson,” I say with all the melodrama of Moses leading his people over the Jordan. But it is true. What we begin today I will not finish with them, (a) because I’m leaving and (b) because there is no end to the conjugations of French verbs.
After weeks and weeks with only two in our tool kit, I have laid down a new set of vocabulary words containing fifteen shiny new verbs. Merry Christmas, my peeps. I actually polled one of my nicest classes. The ones who read books. Know stuff. Can locate Spain on a map. Right before Thanksgiving in making up their next vocabulary list, I asked the students for twenty verbs. “What would you most like to say in French?” After all, there’s only so much “being” and “having” one can do. Oui, ma classe, what would you like to do? The responses I received were charming. One student totally (typically) misunderstood what I was asking. I said: “Take out a sheet of paper and give me three verbs you want to be able to say in French.” He heard: “Give me three things you like.” What I received back, scribbled in his atrocious hand: 1. “I like football.” 2. “I like chicken tenders.” 3. “I love my mom.” If I had any cockles left, the sentiments from this particular student would warm them. He is a boy in perpetual disarray and delay who never (a) gets to class on time (b) with the appropriate materials and see: is like a static connection on the radio or cell phone—sometimes he’s fully connected and emitting a clear signal and sometimes he’s making a lot of noise but you can’t tell for the life of you where it came from or what it means. In the first few weeks I mistake him a trouble maker, but all that is behind us, so many lessons ago. He is a hot mess all right, but endearing beyond compare. No wonder his mamma loves him. Pass the chicken tenders.
The two most important verbs in the French language, I tell them: être and avoir. To be and to have. Soon we will add “to go” and “to make/do,” completing the Q2 requirements for French 1. Since that seemed a bit limiting—like, how exactly can you live with only four verbs in your pocket—I have taken requests. The other verbs they want? I shuffle through the little stack of paper slips written in their childish scrawls: 1. to eat 2. to go. 3. to smile. Another one: “to want.” “To help.” “To dance.” “Madam Burk, I really want to say ‘I can’.” The exercise reminds me of one of the main points the high school French teacher made to me this summer when we met to discuss the post: “Don’t forget, you are teaching children.” He’s right. They really are children–twelve and thirteen years old. What verbs do you want to be able to say? A little girl in the back row: “To play.” “To move.” “To neeeeed.” That about sums up the scope and sequence of one of my class periods, actually. They are each of them, someone’s beloved. They are clueless. And yet so well-meaning. One heard “words” where I said “verbs” and has given me these hot action words to translate: “watermelon,” “PS5,” and “Netflix.” Hhmmmmm….no wonder we are having problems if they think Netflix is a verb. I guess maybe nowadays, child of a pandemic, it is.
I am trying to “program” them, as I did my own children, to carry on sans moi. For the last week or so on their drafts, their worksheets, I add a comment—“You are such a good student! Thank you for working so hard.” Mainly the message is this: I see you. I see how hard you are working (or not), I see how much you want this (or not), and I am right there with you. It’s exactly true what the ancient philosophers knew—so much of education is drawing out of the student that which he or she already knows. Or should know because we sure as Sorbonne have covered it. You can do this. “You can do this,” I urge with every stroke of my pen and every email I return. And I delight when they do, over something mastered, especially from the ones who seem so hopelessly lost. “I DID IT!!” crows the subject line of an email from a little gnome of a girl I was worried couldn’t speak English, never mind French. Last week she sent me a screen shot of her Quizlet on which she had scored a soaring 75. Same one a few weeks later, putting the “random” in random, fires off this little nugget (did I say random??!): “Mrs burk i just found out about john calvin A French theologian but what does French theologian mean??” Just like that. Sorry, kid. Does your English teacher know you write like that? After I dutifully sit down, do a little research and respond, she comes back with, “Yes! thank you i got to learn something new!” Another student off in the Tuileries sends me this little two-liner that I about fall over from laughing: Reaching the edge of his learning but having the satisfaction of a finished essay to crow about, he doesn’t let what he doesn’t know stop him: “J’ai it!” I tell you what, for all the burnout and bone weary fatigue I have experienced in this sub job, their little epiphanies are heartwarming.
Observe: the final project. What happens when you put a writing teacher in a French classroom with no real curriculum or direction? She quickly hits on an idea that has, I confess, mushroomed out of control. There’s a verb for you. “I mushroom, you mushroom, we mushroom.” After a day spent translating “La journée typique de Simone,” in which a little native of Paris details with succinct charm the details of her daily routine, I launch the same assignment for 129 of my French besties, both levels, just to see what they can do. It is five paragraphs, entirely in French. In it you must introduce yourself, tell your name, age, where you’re from, your birthday, your favorite color, what you look like, the members of your family and what they look like, on and on through their details and concluding with your daily routine. The intention was to show off your very best French, all of the vocabulary and grammar you have learned to date and the care and sophistication with which you assemble the pieces. Your final essay, I show them with a grand flourish, will be included in this album we present to Madame upon her return, the last day of class.
The results are anything but what I intended! My French 1’s have dutifully set out with their limited tool kit. But they quickly leave it in the illustrious dust and go for higher constructions. Now instead of “I am from Such and So,” a standard construction from French 1 Chapter 1 page 1, they’re laying down stuff (in French) like “I’ve recently moved here even though I was born in the next town and lived here a short bit before moving in the 4th grade.” Check it out:
J'ai récemment déménagé ici même si je suis né dans la ville voisine et que j'ai vécu ici un peu avant de déménager en 4e année"
What the–? French 1, eh? What happened to “I am from Hanover?” And instead of telling me, “My mother is tall. My mother is pretty. She has 45 years,” instead we are discussing her temperament with all the arsenal of a French 6 warrior and a PhD in clinical psychology. ‘Elle est étonnante“?? Where do you get that?! I can barely understand some of the stuff they’ve pulled off the internet. The truth is, in French, the wanting and the meaning go hand in hand. “Qu’est-ce que ça veut dire?” (what does it mean?) literally means “what is it that it wants to say?” And these, my students, they all want to say so much more than they can.
I was hoping their limitations would press them into studying their notebooks and consulting (yes, print) dictionaries. I have a whole shelf of them in my classroom. Vraiment. It has made me feel so at home to see books on the shelf, c. 1989. “Ma-dam!” busts out one little girl who is exasperation incarnate, thunking the volume down on my desk. “How do you use this?” Ah! “To use…I use, you use, he-she-it uses…” I must confess I considered it a Napoleonic victory to look out over the class at work and see them riffling through the leaf-thin pages. This day may never come again, I thought. Some of them haven’t touched print material in days. Maybe longer. William tells me he hasn’t taken a paper test in two years. What??! Sacré bleu! That will explain the complete flop when I asked for “two printed copies” of their essays, one for me to grade and one for the album. Who knew? Come to find out households today have done away with printers, so in addition to being rendered mute with milk-toast vocab, these French 1s can’t even print out their masterpieces. So much for that plan.
The first phrase I learned in French, decades ago, was this: “Enchantée a faire votre connaissance.” Delighted (enchanted, really but we believe what our teachers tell us) to make your acquaintance. As I have been. By and large, these people are enchanting. Their little essays (from the French essayer—to try) draw it out of them, bring them to life at the perfect time—the end of mine. At this point of the semester they’re dragging. I’m dragging. I’m discouraged by the little I got done and the even less that stuck. My “smart” class has faded in industry and so intelligence, and my needy class has worn me down. My high schoolers have robbed the joy. Now, in reading their 129 draft (times two versions each student) they come alive. Their industry and effort is, for the most part, palpable. They talk about their families, their pets, what they like to do afterschool and on weekends. One is the oldest of seven. A couple are adopted. Several are from other countries. Play instruments. Play sports. They like to run, cook, read, fish with their dad, make jewelry, play soccer, go horseback riding and hang out with friends on the weekends. I told you there was life in the verbs.
I’ve been saying that all along but up until today I don’t think that had sunk in. All they had had at their disposal were those two worn out shoes: “to be” and “to have.” Now in a single lesson the next semester has kicked up her heels and we are conjugating any regular “er” verb I lay down. After fifteen weeks of being pecked to death by French chickens (“Madam Burk, how do you say… how do you say… how do you say…”) I turn the tables on all of them, writing just as fast as I can on the white board, carrying the lesson on the excited interest in the room. I teach them to form the root, then the endings for regular “er” verbs and just like that, we’re off and running-jumping-thinking-speaking. “Quick! How do you say it? “I dance?” “You play?” “Oui, bien! “How do you say, “He eats?” “She looks?” “We laugh?” “We smile?” Oui-Exactement! “How do you say we learn? Here we go. So…how do you say, “I love my mom?” Because now you can. Last week you couldn’t and now you can. “Are you ready?” I ask, daring them to come with me. “Who wants to learn ‘to love’?” Hands shoot up. Ahhh, mes amis.
You already have.
Souvenirs 