Replacing French Trainee Teachers absent for Training......

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 Anybody who used to read this blog regularly must have assumed by now that both the « Mammoth » and « me » had finally succumbed to extinction as a result of the first term's timetable. It's not that I have suddenly run out of things to tell you about French Education and it's recent reforms, it's just that I've been so completely overwhelmed by it all. So many thanks to Mustard Boy and son-who-does-sums, who came to the rescue of the endangered duo!

Readers in the Autumn may remember that I was very busy being formatted by the Ed. Nat. in order to supervise my charming Trainee Teacher, TT. However, as it's highly likely that some of this wisdom may have been lost in translation, it's probably as well for TT that he has just left for a more state-of-the-art training course. This is to be dispensed by the didactic experts at the University and the ghosts of the pedagogical past of the IUFM1, who most of us thought had now disappeared with the other dinosaurs of education.

Now I don't want to appear needlessly awkward and nit picking, and I would have no problem with TT getting on with a bit of teaching theory for a few weeks,were it not for the small problem of his pupils. For his course is full time and, during the four weeks of his absence, he will be replaced by two lovely lasses who have just passed the written part of the CAPES2 and are now about to have a go at real life teaching. I suppose it's less worrying than a brain surgeon handing a scalpel to a medical student, but the logistic problems caused by their arrival and his departure have been the cause of more than a few administrative migrains. Ensuring the handover of six classes and their unfinished, unassessed projects to ONE qualified person is not without problems, but to hand them over  to TWO unqualified students is a minefield in the making.

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TT, on the other hand, left the lycée last Friday on a cloud of insouciance at the idea of the six-week stretch of lessonless bliss ahead. Despite the stern reminder of the IUFM « counsellor » that training was « not a holiday », the remaining few functioning neurones that had surived the teaching tsunami of the last months told him that any alternative would seem like a holiday. Like most of his young colleagues, some of whom have already given up and left or taken sick leave, he has been fighting to cope with a full timetable and precious little in the CAPES syllabus to equip him for lycée life. The French teaching exams are tough and highly competitive but they serve mainly to verify the level of attainment in the subject to be taught rather than any real aptitude to teach.

The difficulties encountered in implementing the teacher training reform were of course foreseeable and foreseen. And the resulting stress and worry for all concerned perhaps explains the significant decrease in the number of CAPES candidates this year. According to Libé the numbers have shot down by almost half. But then in these days of government spending cuts, what better way to reduce the civil service pay roll than by dissuading people to sign up in the first place?

1  Institut Universitaire de Formation des Maîtres (French Teacher Training College)

2  French competitive civil service entrance exams that qualify teachers.  Successful candidates of the written part go on to do two days of oral exams in teaching theory and English.   The best candidates are then selected and will do their probationary year next year ... like TT

Training TT ... French Teacher Trainee Reform

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They say the golden rule of blogging is not only to do it regularly but always to post on the same day. Well I haven't a clue what day I published last  time, and my daily delays have nearly extended into a mega moratorium ... but Brodie is back

So what's new in the world of the Ed. Nat.? Well first of all I never did get round to reporting back on my training course for TT. It was a four-hour morning event for teacher trainers in all disciplines and we English teachers were assembled in the IUFM's 1 lecture hall.   Now this is not the cosiest of places at the best of times  but it  rapidly resembled a station waiting room as an assortment of lost-looking, non-English-speaking ladies, in long skirts and flat sandals, plodded hopefully round about us, apparently oblivious to our three inspectors. Then, seemingly satisfied that their own inspectors were not in hiding under the seats, they  crashed out again, leaving the door open to let in the freezing unseasonal north wind. I have to hand it to our inspectors though, they never batted an eyelid, good naturedly ploughing on with their programme while the rest of us simultaneously fumed and froze.

It seems that Lyon University was very successful at getting its candidates through the competitive English concours 2 exams this year, which explains why there were nearly fifty trainers at our meeting.  Since French teachers are trained in the Académie where they took their exams, each of Lyon's successful candidates  needs a personal tutor to steer him through his probationary year. After this they will be posted to whatever far afield educational authority needs them, usually Créteil, Vaulx-en-Velin, or one of  our other educational disaster areas. This presumably influences the content of what we, the artisans of education, are expected to impart to our apprentices. 

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Apparently most of the official blurb about the French teacher training reform concentrates on general crowd control skills and the best methods for meting out punishments, the latter coming as quite a relief since most of us thought they had been abolished. Such is the essence of any young teacher's classroom survival kit nowadays. Little is mentioned about how we should impart knowledge. But then with three hours of « exploration » a week and two hours of «personal accompaniment», none of which is to be assessed, knowledge probably isn't number one on education's list of priorities.  Certainly,  we are losing the fight to make the nation bilingual, even in seconde, our equivalent of the Upper V, we now have a mere two and a half hours a week, compared with four and a half, fifteen years ago.

Still, it's not all doom and gloom.  The institution is clearly keen to adapt to our changing society.   For example, I'm sure TT was very relieved to learn that, should any of his pupils attack each other or him  during my visit  to his  class, the Ed. Nat. has authorized me to throw myself into the fray.  Come to think of it, this could be why next week I'm going on another course  ... maybe this one will include classroom Karate!

1  Institut Universitaire de Formation des Maîtres (teacher training college)

2  Concours (CAPES and Agrégation).  Competitive entry civil servants exams which allow university graduates to have tenure within the Education Nationale.   Successful candidates have very little say in where they are sent on their first "posting" and often find themselves sent to the north of France.

TT and Me : Teaching Teacher Trainers after the IUFM closures

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My overflowing timetable does have at least one advantage, namely that the school year seems to be evaporating like water from my oleander pots in August. Not only do I have an extra class this year but I also have to make regular visits to TT (trainee teacher) and advise him on his lessons. Given my allergy to French pedagogical jargon and  theory, this is a risky operation, which I hope won't finish his career before it starts. However, such feelings of diffidence will soon be a thing of the past and next week will hopefully see me brimming with confidence about my turorial role. This is because on Monday morning, what is left of our dismantled IUFM 1 will be training me to teach TT. It's only four hours of course but TT and I are both very excited as we anticipate my return, armed with the magic formulae that will transform him into the roi de l'estrade 2.

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Presumably it's a bit late for them to explain to me how I should have prepared TT for his first lesson of the term, unless they're counting on inflicting me on another of the Ed Nat's 4 neophytes next year. However, I shall doubtless receive all manner of forms and formulae for assessing TT's capacity for classroom survival. Fortunately, as a beginner, he doesn't have any Upper Sixth students so he's safely out of reach of the Barbarians. The latter are now doing a lot of uncaccustomed number crunching, working out how many extra points they need to pass their Baccalauréat in June, despite their abysmal marks in French 3  in the Summer. Their teachers are already showing signs of strain as they take stock of the task that lies ahead.

Of course it's early days yet, but so far I haven't been confronted with anything remotely resembling the worst of last year's Lycée low life . This is just as well as TT has to sit in on my classes from time to time and a mere glimpse of last year's war zone would probably have prompted his resignation within the week. As it happens, his last visit went rather well.  Various hands waved in reply to my questions, silence reigned while they dutifully copied my prose into their exercise books and they all seemed hell bent on showing TT how lucky he was to have me as his tutor. I breathed a sigh of relief when the bell rang. Nothing would happen to spoil the effect. TT strolled off to find his own classroom and a couple of my pupils stopped for a chat on the way out.

"Who was that pupil at the back of the classroom ?" enquired one sharp young lad.

Anxious to safeguard the authority of my very young-looking colleague, I hastened to dispel any doubts as to his qualifications and pointed out forcefully that the « pupil » was a member of STAFF!   This was obviously not a satisfactory explanation however and I could almost hear the little guy's grey cells busily processing the information before giving me the benefit of his analysis.

"A member of  STAFF", he repeated in a conspiratorial tone, a look of enlightenment dawning on his intelligent young face. He had finally cracked it.

"Je vois!!" he exclaimed, positively pink with triumph.   "Monsieur was ....the INSPECTOR "!

Now floundering helplessly, I muttered half inaudibly that it was something like that, and fled.  There was nothing to be done but to inform a delighted TT about his meteoric ascension from trainee English teacher to inspector in the Education Nationale.

1   Institut Universitaire de Formation des Maîtres, French Teacher Training College
2  All classrooms in our lycée are equipped with a platform, or estrade, in front of the blackboard for teachers to stand on and  "deliver" their lesson. 

3 Bacccalauréat oral and written examinations in French, taken the year before the rest of    theBaccalauréat papers, at the end of the Lower VI. Failure has to be « compensated » by a corresponding number of marks over ten in other subjects, thus giving the pupil an overall average of 10/20

4  Education Nationale

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Demise of the IUFMs ... Dispute about Training French Teachers

So much time has passed since I last posted that I nearly shut up shop and called it a day.   However,  with a workload that has increased by about thirty percent, letting off steam on my blog seemed a good way of not letting my timetable take over my life, its flooded and overflowing state largely due to the Ed Nat's latest innovation: the abolition of the IUFMs* or French teacher training colleges.

Now I have to admit to having always been extremely critical of the IUFMs, which I felt did nothing to prepare me for life in the classroom. Maybe my British origins, or a lifelong immunity to maths and pĥysics, explain my aversion to French erudite teaching theories, my preference going to hands on experience and practical examples. Even music here is studied for at least a year « in theory », with children learning notes and keys and not so much as the squeak of an instrument to be heard!   Those who have the grit and determination to survive the boredom do go on to become fine musicians but their number is limited and neither I nor my children have many friends who ever got to grips with actually playing anything. During my own training, I supposed that the IUFMs' attachment to seemingly meaningless long words and abstract terminology were just another example of a somewhat dry approach to learning. However, I gradually discovered that plenty of  my French colleagues  felt much the same way as I did and as a result we would all get on with correcting tests during lectures, longing for the day when we would be permitted to call a spade a spade and the « bouncing referent » a football.

So why, you might wonder, has there been so much fuss about this year's new scheme under which trainees are simply taken under the wing of an experienced teacher, watched, advised and nurtured until they get the hang of things ?

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Well the main problem is that, instead of the six or eight hours' a week teaching required in the past, trainees are now doing a full timetable, like their qualified colleagues. Of course this is now possible because they are no longer taken up with all that training at the IUFMs. It also has the undoubted advantage of contributing to the government's current economy drive since they are paying their trainees the same amount and getting three times as much work out of them.  On the other hand the downside is that thousands of untried, untrained and unprepared graduates are being unleashed on unsuspecting pupils. Most had no idea which school they would be teaching in until three or four days before the beginning of term. This meant nothing could be prepared in the holidays and with the best will in the world they are going to have their work cut out preparing lesson plans now!  Which is where my extra workload comes in.

When asked last July if I would take on a trainee in September, I accepted because I felt that a more practical approach had to be better than the mystifying jargon that had left me just as « untrained » as the young colleagues who everyone is protesting about at the moment. Needless to say, this was not the most diplomatic of moves and I received numerous union communications explaining that we should all be refusing to co-operate. Certainly by August two thirds of our fledgling teachers were still without tutors. And on my return to the Lycée at the beginning of the month, with trainee in tow, my treachery did not go unnoticed ! Seemingly other tutors have since been bullied, bribed or blackmailed into accepting their task although some are 20 kms or so from their trainee.

Unsurprisingly, we seem to be facing yet another French education reform that hasn't been thought through properly, or that has been largely motivated by financial considerations. As a result, it has little or no support from those who are required to implement it, and yet it would only have required a reduction of a few hours in the teaching loads of the tutors and their charges for the whole thing to have functioned pretty satisfactorily. But for that to happen, the decision makers up there in their ivory tower in Paris would have had to listen to the people on the ground … et ça, ce n'est pas demain la veille!

*IUFM Institut Universitaire de Formation des Maîtres

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Marking the Baccalauréat : June 2010

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At last! The written part of the Baccalauréat is over.  Between the 17th and the 23rd June a seemingly ceaseless stream of teachers and candidates beat a trail from one lycée to another in order to avoid staff marking their pupils' work. This meant teachers from Lyon sometimes driving a hundred kilometers to collect their exam papers and literary students travelling to an exam centre on the other side of the city to sit their specific version of the "Bac".  I sometimes wonder if it's all an Ed. Nat.1 plot to prevent slacking by promoting the adrenalin flow.

So with no more excitement  until the orals next week, I've just spent my first day in the company of my pile of Baccalauréat papers.   There are seventy of them and they make pretty grim reading.  Yet somehow beavering away under my clerodendron tree, with the perfume of jasmine and linden blossom wafting around me, makes me wince less at the treatment meted out to my mother tongue.  Needless to say, I don't feel I have much to blog about, but will be back as soon as I've finished  writing red all over those papers!

Post Scriptum

A post Post Scriptum in celebration of the fact that I have just this moment finished plodding through all that Bac prose. Anybody thinking about TEFL in France should be warned that decoding the Gallic version of English can be a linguistic challenge even for the most resourceful of pedagogues.  Asked to imagine a sequel to the extract from a detective story that they had  already answered questions on, candidates wrote at length about the « swetty son » who disappeared (in sweltering heat?) like a character from a « Mary Hings Clarke » novel.  I suppose I should have been relieved to learn that "swetty" did actually turn up again, still « in life ».  But it was at the end of their compositions that I found the key to their linguistic problems.  When giving their opinion on detective stories, the emphatic and consensual "don't like read" but "love action", explained it all!

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Clerodendron

1   Education Nationale

Friends not Foes?

The Baccalauréat is still occupying most of my time so this will be another piddling post. In any case, with the whole world holding forth about  the Fall of the Blues in France, there's not much left to say. It’s ironical though that this should all have happened at the same time as the 18th June De Gaulle celebrations. It seems the country has a whole new débâcle to tell itself a "tale" about, except that Roselyne Bachelot's1 Ministerial scolding makes less promising material than the General's appeal.

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I’ve been surprised though how genuinely shocked and upset so many  French people have been about what is to me just another football match. After all, judging by the number of incidents at matches, le foot doesn’t exactly bring out the best in people. But maybe the French football fiasco’s coinciding with the trial of Société Générale trader Jérôme Kerviel and the anniversary of the De Gaulle appeal, has somehow made us think about the nation's values, today and yesterday. And maybe to some, Nicolas Sarkozy's  allegiance to Gaullism seems an anachronism in a society where rogue traders and footballers make millions, while showing contempt for their country, their hierarchy and the rules of the game. In what seemed like a wake-up call, enraged French football fans in South Africa said they had cheered the opposing team and a mayor in the Var2 said the Blues'  world cup bonuses should go to Provence flood victims. The entire nation, normally renowned for chauvinism rather than patriotism, is suddenly concerned about the image of their country, the fronde and the flag.

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Then in addition to all this unaccustomed patriotic consternation, there has  been  a fair amount of concern about our loss of face outre manche.   As a result, the reaction of the British press after the defeat by Mexico was widely reported by the French media and led to accusations about the British dishing out lessons as usual and generally enjoying the French defeat. However when the Blues finally hit the bottom, we were surprised to learn that the perfide albion3 had subsided into silence, leaving the rest of the world to wind up the post mortem. There was much conjecture about why this should be, but a colleague I had lunch with today was sure he had the answer.  An anglophile, and more into physics than football, he pointed out kindly that France was in such dire distress that to have made any more of the matter would have been like kicking a man when he's down. And, unlike the rest of the world, he told me, the British are just too fair play for that.  I found myself breathing a sigh of relief.   Having suffered something of an identity crisis over the past few days it was reassuring to know that however strained Franco-British relations may seem sometimes,  both sides of my split nationality are friends after all!

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1  Minister of sport
2  The name of the Département or county where Draguignan and other communities suffered severe flooding recently
3  Term used since the seventeenth century, referring to Britain in a less friendly context!

Beating the Blues

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No time for blogging today but  can't help feeling  a bit sorry for  Raymond , with all the stick he's been getting.   After a year of battling with my own brand of Barbarians, I can imagine how he must feel about all that anarchy.  Still, at least the Ed. Nat.'s protests about society's refusal of authority are finding an echo elsewhere and on top of that everybody suddenly feels concerned by their national identity ... definitely blue!

Back after the Bac.1

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1 Baccalauréat: French high school graduation exams that are taking up my time at the end of the school year

The British and the French: Friends or Foes?

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The last couple of days I have been suffering from another bout of cultural schizophrenia and it's not the football but the fall of France in 1940  that's got me doing the splits this time.   Tomorrow our Nicolas will be commemorating the seventieth anniversary of the General's appeal, which has attracted a fair bit of attention from the Beeb. This is hardly surprising of course, given their role in the whole affair, although  I'm not sure that Sarko would have liked the tone of Allen Little's 1 broadcast this morning.

He would doubtless have been edified to learn  how much France still needs to venerate this moment because De Gaulle represents an alternative conception of France.  Thanks to  him, we were told, the French have a tale to tell themselves about a France that didn't capitulate but fought on, didn't collaborate but resisted.  And that « tale » was the founding narrative of the post war French Republic.  In a nutshell, it was what enabled the country to forget about all those nasty collaboration stories.   I suppose it must have slipped Mr Little's mind that in 2000, Jacques Chirac inaugurated a museum  the precise purpose of which was to refresh the country's memory about the two Frances, Pétain's and de Gaulle's. But anyway, even if nous les français occasionally gloss over the unpalatable bits of World War II history, don't we the British do the same thing? I mean how often is Dresden brought to everyone's attention?

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In Tuesday's Thought for The Day3, Angela Tilby astutely remarked that history is always provisional and that we shouldn't expect a final truth. She was thinking about the Savile report, due out later that day, but she could just as well have been referring to the second world war, which is receiving a fair amount of attention from the French media as well.   For example, last night on Arte, German, French and British wartime newsreel reports related the period leading up to the fall of France and the General's appeal. When commenting on footage showing the evacuation of Dunkirk, the journalist dug up an old bone of contention.   He pointedly remarked that the rescued French soldiers disembarking in Britain were doubtless not as happy as they looked, given that so many of their (French) comrades had been abandoned on the beaches.  This implied accusation, that British soldiers had been given preference over French by the rescuers, reminded me of an episode nearly thirty years ago when I first came to live in France.

I had invited four French and British friends for dinner.  Nothing disastrous had occurred in the kitchen, the wine had won all round approval and yet, as we turned out attention to the cheeseboard, I suddenly found myself in the middle of a conversational minefield.  It all began when Mrs Brit mentioned Dunkirk, clearly one of our history's moments of hope and glory. The attack on the cheeseboard stopped abruptly, the knife quivered uncertainly in the Camembert. Monsieur  France paused, giving proper consideration to this version of  history before launching himself into battle.  Comment? But Dunkirk was évidemment yet another betrayal, like Mers el-Kébir! The cowardly British had saved their own soldiers, leaving the majority of the French behind to face the Germans.

The tension was palpable and Mrs Brit's consternation acute.   She  of course had been brought up on the "tale" of the little boats and the Dunkirk miracle.  I admit that at the time I was shocked too.  Yet, with time I've gradually come round to the idea that if I'd  been born here, I would have probably thought the same way.  Let's face it, in 1972 I found it impossible to believe that the British army had knowingly shot at defenceless civil rights marchers.  But that was provisional too.

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1  BBC 4 From our Own Correspondent
2  Franco-German TV channel
3  BBC Radio 4

End of Year Lesson

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Well I was going to write a post about Sunday in the Dombes, but it’ll wait. After all my rants in this blog, it's time to write about  one of those moments  in the pupil teacher relationship when they are on our side, like this afternoon!  It was two o'clock and, as I walked down the endless empty corridor that runs the length of the lycée classrooms, I reflected that the government’s conquest of the third term was less than conclusive. At any rate, conquered or not, it was over so far as the  pupils were concerned and the few stragglers still on the premises were clearly  on automatic pilot, there more by accident than design.   So I was staggered to find my entire class of year tens waiting expectantly for our last lesson together.  Not that  we were into anything very cerebral, but after watching the final episode of Bend it like Beckham they chatted quite happily in their fractured, enthusiastic English, until one of them noticed my Tupperware.

Flapjacks*, I explained, handing them round. The announcement was greeted with a mixture of glee  and suspicion but I had presumably chalked up enough credit over the year for them to take a risk with English baking. There was a moment of thoughtful munching before the verdict finally fell. Trop bon Madame! Seemingly school lunch had been a light affair because they emptied the entire contents of the box in five minutes  and then asked for the recipe. To be honest, I was caught short on that one. First of all, my flapjack recipe comes from the Hamlyn book, which was written in the pre-metric Middle Ages and meant I was frantically converting ounces into grams.   After that I had to explain about golden syrup. I did my best to promote the little green and gold can and gave a detailed description of Carrefour’s exotic foods shelf, but I have a feeling that a new, French, flapjack is about to be born. It didn’t matter how hard I explained about sugar refinement, molasses and sugar cane, or which language I did it in, they were, and still are, convinced I really meant maple syrup.

But who cares!  What really mattered was that they had wanted to show their appreciation in the kindest way possible, by  coming in full formation to my last lesson and by expressing the desire to work  with me next year. All of a sudden my Annus horribilis with the Barbarians, the horror stories of colleagues and the nagging worry about what’s round the corner for next year, receded into insignificance. As I looked round at the group of trusting, positive students, cheerily chomping away on my flapjacks, next September somehow felt like something to look forward to!

*  Recipe for French readers on request!

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