French Twist

by Catherine Crawford

  In France, the kids are still taught how to write with fountain pens, to avoid the unsightly patte de mouche (ink trails resembling fly footprints) that can be caused when using a ballpoint pen. This ain’t France.

  In a very general way, my girls come by it honestly, as many of us Americans tilt toward efficiency over beauty and literally forget to stop and smell/color in the roses. But how to counter this inkling in my French pursuit? I have made Oona work on her handwriting and suggested that Daphne go back and spruce up her coloring, but I’m afraid I simply turned this into another chore for them. I had hoped for them to really feel it—like that imaginary French kid in my mind.

  To counter this, the only thing I could think to do was to deliberately seek out—and revel in—beauty. I called it “Sublime Time,” in hopes that the girls would be more interested in something with a smart name (go ahead and scoff, but it has worked wonders in the past). I’d announce something like, “We are going for a walk, and everyone must point out five things they find beautiful and explain why.” Lamentably, early on this also gave birth to another new appellation, “Daphne’s Sublime Time Whine”: “This is boring. Why can’t we go home or to a playground?” Mercifully, as with almost everything we’ve tried, she got used to it. She even got into it. To my delight and, I’ll admit, surprise, there was definitely something new going on with the girls the last time we visited the Metropolitan Museum of Art. It’s not as if Oona and Daphne were opining on the use of shadow in Caravaggio’s late works, but they didn’t run through with blinders on, stopping only momentarily at things that might include a funny cartoon (as in days of yore), asking when we could hit the cafeteria. We spent a lot of time with the Flemish. Too much? Let’s just say a lot.

  GOOD STUDENT

  This priority has given me cause for some extended thought and investigation. It’s kind of a toughie, and if ever I were granted the ability to magically blend our two cultural approaches on only one portion of this puzzle, I’d use it on education (or discipline—oh, I can’t decide). The truth is, the discipline we can revamp on our own, but as the French and American school systems are so vastly different, I would need the assistance of a genie for any transformation. But that doesn’t mean we can’t learn something from our friends in France.

  I find the French approach to education fascinating—and also a bit terrifying. It’s complicated.

  Because of this, everything—including Daphne’s kindergarten parent-teacher conference—is put through the French sieve, and nothing goes unquestioned. By the time I managed to bring my jawbone back up to its proper position on my face, the aforementioned conference was almost over. Daphne’s teacher had just finished telling us about how Daph was one of the most dutiful, willing, and obedient students in her class. Really?

  Mac and I were both so surprised that I’m afraid we squandered at least one of our allotted ten meeting minutes in shocked silence, trying to imagine our little combustion engine of a child sitting quietly at her desk during lessons. And of course I couldn’t help thinking: How delightfully French.

  The Daphne-behaving-well part was French; the meeting itself was anything but. I’m told that in France, parent-teacher conferences last about an hour and a half—and there are often cocktails involved. Maybe that is the answer to teacher burnout here in the United States. The job might seem less exhausting and thankless with some regular libations. I am only half kidding here, as I once witnessed the teachers’ dining room table at a collège (kind of like middle school) in France set for luncheon with multiple bottles of wine—on a typical, nothing-special Thursday, mind you. I read that day’s menu as well and remember thinking that a teaching gig in France might just be the ticket, if only for lunchtime.

  Ever since a twelve-year-old Parisian girl beat me in a speed round of listing the country capitals of Europe, I have had a hunch that there is something to be gained from a good look at the way the French school their kids. In my defense, she lives in Europe and there’s been a lot of redrawing, additions, and subtractions to the map I studied in high school. Moldova? (Chişinău, dammit!) Then again, this kid was twelve and would have won even if I’d had all the time in the world.

  My buddy Paul, an alumnus of French national education himself, commented that the only way to go to a bad school in France is to pay for it. In other words, French public schools are generally excellent. No shock there, perhaps, as the French Ministry of National Education is among the top five largest employers in the world. Because French education is so centralized and organized, students in all regions of France are taught the exact same curriculum, unless they are being privately educated. For these étudiants, school is not fun and games but honest-to-goodness work. Okay—so although I can’t do a whole lot about the U.S. national system of education, I can try to weave in a bit of this French attitude.

  When Oona first started school, I worried that the New York City school-district mandate for homework in kindergarten would drain her and squelch any enthusiasm for learning. I was so stuck on the idea that, after a string of post-school meltdowns within the first month, Mac and I began to tour private institutions. We fell in love with the Brooklyn Waldorf School, not too far from our apartment, but soon realized that this was not an option unless we won the lottery. Instead, I decided that we’d ignore the homework altogether. (In hindsight, maybe it was the constant playdates and dance classes that had Oona coming unglued every evening.) So Oona did not do any of the kindergarten homework. Her American mom said that she didn’t have to. For fun (of the masochistic sort), I now like to imagine how that would have gone down in a French school.

  Save for their luxurious—and delicious—parent-teacher conferences, French parents don’t spend a whole lot of time in the classroom. They’re not welcome. In fact, if parents want to speak with a teacher, they typically have to make an appointment with the school secretary, which is often a lengthy process; they also must have a really good reason. When a child is in school in France, the school is in charge. There’s no barrage of emails asking for parent volunteers to come and clean the hamster cage or read during library time. Again, I know this is not a fair comparison and that constant budget cuts have necessitated an even greater classroom presence for us American parents. Still, I find the French outlook on school intriguing and have selectively chosen elements of it to emulate, particularly their habit of making school a top priority in the lives of their children.

  For French parents, it is when their kids come home from school that they must step up. First there is the homework—which is not unsubstantial. Also, French children are ranked in the classroom, and teachers read their scores aloud on a daily basis. No parent wants their kid to be announced last and used as the example of how not to be (alas, humiliation is a common practice à l’école too), so the pressure is on for parents to make sure their little student understands the lessons on a daily basis. This French priority of raising a good student may be crucial to keeping the kids from being completely dejected.

  I’ll admit, I’ve become obsessed with French education. Throughout that country, schools convene on Monday, Tuesday, Thursday, and Friday. The hours of operation are usually 8:30 A.M. to 4:30 P.M., give or take fifteen minutes, which explains how they make up for Wednesday (although I’m sure they aren’t looking at it that way). I love this. Oh, how I wish the French hours were one of those elements I could incorporate. French children don’t expect a whole lot after school, because it’s already pretty late and they have homework to do. As one mom from Dijon said, “We just go home, tend to the schoolwork, have a little dinner, and then Luc goes to bed.” Luc, her son, is eight. My girls seem to think that their day starts over once school lets out at 2:50, and when I’m on pickup duty I usually get hit with a “What are we going to do today, Mom?”

  “I know! How about homework, dinner, and bed?”

  These days, Oona rarely has a problem getting her homework done, but until I toughened up, I would often let her pound it out over bre
akfast or even in the car on the way to school. Désolée darling. Homework comes before anything else after school. Ever since I’ve stopped allowing the girls to watch television on school days, this hasn’t been too difficult to implement. It’s a beautiful thing when priorities sync up.

  Let’s head back to the classroom to feed my infatuation a bit more. It’s there you’ll find that French teachers aren’t big on praising effort, improvement—or even perfection. Just about every lesson is graded out of a possible twenty points. That big twenty is rather elusive, though. One French mom told me that she thought it was illegal for teachers to give a twenty out of twenty. Having grown very accustomed to smiley faces and “Good Job!” stamps on everything that comes home, this sounds overly rigorous. On the other hand, I don’t want my kids thinking that school is supposed to be fun. It can be, and that’s great. But there is also work involved.

  In speaking with Americans who have moved their families to France, the primary concern I detected for their expat kids is consistently the French schools. It’s not that these transplants worry their children won’t get a good education (oh, they will); rather they fear the rigidity of the system. And rightly so. There is not a lot of time spent assessing learning and behavioral disorders in French schools. Anton, a father of two French schoolchildren, recalled, “I laughed when my daughter came home and said that she wanted to be a street sweeper. I guessed that her teacher had said that if you do not work hard at school, you will be a street sweeper. My teachers would scare us with the same thing when I was a young student. Maybe this teacher didn’t know it could sound like a fun job to a six-year-old.”

  Cute story, kind of … but I can see why some non-natives might have trepidation. Pressure on a kindergartner? Anton later added, “They do not look for things like the ADHD and learning disorders here in the same way as in the United States. To these kids, they say, ‘Do better so you can pass your bac, or you will be sweeping the streets.’ ” The bac, short for baccalauréat, is the greatest weight on young Frenchies. It is a qualifying exam that most students take after they complete their secondary education (like high school), and the score determines if and where they can go on to further studies. In other words, this test determines the rest of their lives. But no pressure.

  Let’s take stock. In my perfect, French-American hybrid world, I would incorporate some of the inbred focus and seriousness on education, the genius school hours, and, of course, les cocktails. I’d leave behind the enormous pressure, humiliation, and possible overlooking of kids with special needs.

  To reiterate, the French aim to raise expert little raconteurs, but the classroom is definitely not the place to practice their storytelling. The teacher does the talking and the kids do the listening—unless the teacher calls on them. I frequently heard from folks with a foot in both countries that the type of open dialogue common in the United States, with children encouraged to ask questions and challenge ideas, does not exist in the French classroom. As one American mom with kids in French school put it, “There isn’t much emphasis on individual thinking, teamwork, or building self-esteem.” The French teacher knows all. When I toured schools in France, I noticed that often, especially at les collèges and les lycées (middle schools and high schools), the teachers stand on a platform so they are slightly elevated and, quite literally, looking and talking down to their students.

  As strict and hard-edged as this may sound, there is some value to such differences in the teacher-student relationship, the foremost of which is that a French student must respect the professeur. At least to the teacher’s face. In France, it is not the teacher who is graded and ranked by performance, it is the children. If a student does not study hard enough to pass on to the next level, this will not be considered the fault of the teacher. That child may just become a street sweeper. Actually, for those students who do not perform well on the bac test, the French government also provides further education in the form of technical schools. Great in theory, except for the fact that all of this is determined in their teenage years. It appears Robert Frost was not talking about France when he wrote: “College is a refuge from hasty judgment.”

  The French are hasty when it comes to learning, and children had better catch on quick—or suffer some of that notorious humiliation. My heart broke when I heard my American friend describe her ten-year-old’s trials at school in Paris: “As the French schooling system commonly does … they seize any opportunity to use a student’s poor performance as an example of what not to do. And that’s exactly what happened. Poor Rita. She reported that the teacher repeated, staccato style, ‘Vite, vite, vite!’ when she was laboring at the board, and when she wasn’t ‘getting it’ quickly enough, her teacher turned to the class with upturned hands, a shrug of his shoulders, and a roll of his eyes. Then the class laughed at her. She was mortified. Fortunately we had forewarned the girls, at the beginning of the school year, that their days of the ‘nurturing the whole child’ mentality were over.” Again, I prefer to leave the humiliation in France.

  I took a look at the corresponding curricula for French and American schoolchildren. On paper they are not so dissimilar, outside the fact that the French begin the mastery of a foreign language (or two) early on, and, on a recent curriculum for French kindergarten, they listed “Civics and Morals,” where “Students learn the rules of politeness and social behavior.” So not surprising.

  The real difference is in attitude. Luckily for the American kids, there are such things as second chances.

  These top priorities listed by my French confidants are all so sound and significant that it made me wonder why it took studying child-rearing in France for me to elevate them. This, in turn, started me thinking about why we are so divergent in the first place.

  For example, on the first day of school this year, a few of my friends who’d opted not to have children were griping about their Facebook feeds being inundated with back-to-school photos. Due diligence had me immediately wondering how this played out in France. Turns out, French parents do not post as much about the adorable and daffy shenanigans of their kids. This is due, probably, to a combination of factors: The French are more private to begin with, they tend to keep their family lives separate from their social lives, and—the clincher—they are not so consumed with the lives of their offspring.

  So it goes.

  I just logged on to Facebook for an honest assessment, and there is obviously some truth in what my kids have been repeating of late: I am not French. We are not French. My wall is awash in photos and videos of Oona and Daphne and little else. Mac is more diverse than I with his postings, but I wouldn’t really say that he’s gone French here either, especially as he has a Twitter feed devoted to the whimsy that often springs forth from Oona and Daphne. We can’t seem to help ourselves. But I don’t want him to. If Mac had gone full French, he never would have Tweeted these gems, among many others:

  Oona, finishing her waffle: “Can I lick my plate?” Me: “Sure.” So she did and said: “Great, and barely any syrup in my hair too.”

  Daphne: “I don’t want to be bad, so I’m gonna stop being bad—until Christmas.”

  Me, watching a pack of teens walk past us: “Are you excited to be a teenager someday?” Oona: “Like, no!”

  Daph: “Why do I have to brush my teeth?” Me, exhausted: “Because everyone brushes their teeth.” Daph: “Robots don’t.” Me: “Okay, good point.”

  Oona, apparently having been successfully marketed to: “Does my hair look 100 percent shinier?”

  Catherine, having left Daph’s bed for Oona’s last night: “I’d rather stay here for a bit.” Oona: “Sure, I seem to have lost my sense of squirm.”

  Oona, making a pretty airtight case: “We weren’t fighting; we just had different thoughts.”

  Daphne, to me: “You farted. It sounded like, ‘Leave me alone!’ ”

  Daphne: “Am I good at interrupting?”

  Me, watching Daphne give my breakfast cereal a deep-tissue mas
sage: “Please don’t touch my cereal.” Daphne: “I’m not.”

  Then again, if we were more efficacious in the good French fight, my kids wouldn’t have said 90 percent of the above. But they did, and I’m not French. I’m just doing my best to uncover the useful bits of France’s child-rearing ways—and along the road I’m reminded of all the things I love about my homeland, particularly our big messy humor and pluck. To borrow a turn of phrase from Royal Tenenbaum, another of my cinematic flames, we’ve got a lot of “grit, fire, and guts” going on in this country.

  So how is it that we ended up so different from the French, anyway? No one can deny that our relationship with them is un peu fraught because of these disparities. For many, it’s a love/hate–type situation. Kind of like the little boy and girl on the playground who spend all of their time pestering and claiming to loathe each other, but nestled down in there amid the conflict there’s also fascination, and a bit of a crush.

  I turned to journalists Jean-Benoît Nadeau and Julie Barlow and their book Sixty Million Frenchmen Can’t Be Wrong (Why We Love France but Not the French) to try to get a better understanding of why this is. Nadeau and Barlow spent two years in France on a mission to define for us non-natives what makes the French so very … French. The authors point out in the very beginning that much of this clash stems from the fact that we judge them by our own standards, even though “Different things move the French—as if they had different ropes, gears, and springs inside them. Oddly, Anglo-Americans can see that the Japanese, the Chinese, and the Indians are different, and that these fundamental differences shape national characters and the way things are done in those societies. Why can’t we do this with the French?” Although I scrutinized the French in a desperate attempt to get a grip on my wayward parenting practices, I’ve found it helpful to keep Nadeau and Barlow’s observation in mind; we are very different cultures coming from very different perspectives. There needn’t be a winner here (yet there’s no reason not to poach a few French practices that can bring a little tranquillity to my home).