Le Système: the Inside Scoop.
It was March all day and I haven’t noticed! Here, where the transition from winter to spring and then to Hurricane Katrina again happens at least twice a day, this month has no particular significance. To me, a new month is a reminder that the contract runs out in eight weeks, the epistemological clock is a-ticking, and I have to solve this quarter - life crisis, find a job, stop time and decide what to do with my life… Although I get a feeling that I never quite will. Sometimes I think that if I hadn’t thought that I am made of better stuff, I could have been a way better teacher. But I still have reasons to believe that I've been a not - so - bad (assistant) teacher so far.. Hell, I think I could have made a pretty good assistant pilot, too, if I “landed the job”. Get it? Get it?
Being an assistant is a curious liminal state of a mediator between students and the teacher, of trying to brush aside the establishment while being part of it.
Student 1: Madame?
Moi: Monsieur?
Student 2: Madame, il n’est pas monsieur!
Moi: Et moi, je ne suis pas madame. Je m’appelle Alisa
This exact conversation has taken place several times. If I am not Madame, they won’t be afraid to make mistakes, you see. Hell, they can even discreetly play Candy Crush on their cellphones until I find a way to bring it home that it directly affects their mark, along with the fact that time spent on cellphones in class is directly proportionate to the level of regret when they are 25-ish and hire someone like me for 15 bucks an hour to re-teach them. But for now, I would rather check on their progress and call on them more often in class and spend my 15 bucks an hour earned from 25-year-olds on therapy in the from of wine and cheese. I don’t like taking cellphones away, haven’t figured out why yet. It may have to do with the belief that treating étudiants like reasonable creatures will turn them into ones. Or is it that by not infantilising them, I expect respect in return despite not being a Madame? That sounds awfully reasonable, what was I thinking? Any logic, or any other laws that govern the universe in general, do not apply to a lycée. Example: when technological issues send yet another lesson plan to waste, something has to come out of nothing; and as for the laws of gravity, I challenge you to test those in a shoulder - width corridor as the bell rings. Have you ever seen the buffalo run?
It seems like throughout the ages, a lot of creative people have hated and even failed school. From the Russian canonical poet Aleksandr Sergeevich Pushkin to a more contemporary French painter Ibara, who has recently had a chance to complain to me personally during his exhibition in Quimper. Few survive. My everyday breakfast partner Stephen Fry was a hooligan, a thief and a substance addict (sugar and tobacco, mostly). That is, of course, until he went to Cambridge. According to all of them, the system is to blame for a lot of withered spirits, and my colleagues could not agree more. Le système is in the air, it’s the hip word in the teachers’ room nowdays, topped only by “la vache” and “chiant”. The latter expressions are often used to express teacher - student interaction.
If Le Système has been stigmatizing talent since the time when people wrote their journals with a feather, what is an assistant like me to do? I figured I haven’t learned languages to teach them to unwilling victims, I have learned them to write idle blog posts. Most of the time, I am doing neither of the two while looking for veritas in vino and letting Candy Crush sweep up whatever sparks of imagination le système has left in the corners of young minds.
Ah, I have almost forgotten what it’s like NOT to write a conclusion. Feels nice. Very honest.