I loved French. I was good at it. Since my eighth grade year, when I had
discovered the quirky operas of French-German Jew Jacques Offenbach, I was singing
and dancing French, at least when no one was watching.
I was as good French student. My French teacher thought so, too, enough that
she let me skip French 2 and slide into upper-division French with the seniors.
I was a sophomore at the time, and I sense the ressentiment from some
of the upper classmen, since I ate their Brie while scoring easy points, too
boot. I earned the Scholastic Achievement award my junior year, unexpectedly,
to an extent, beating out one of the native French speakers who refused to do
any work. Fed up with my impatience to do more, my French teacher let me teach my
high school French class – I was the only student in French 5, the rest of the
class an uneasy mixture of French three and four — at the end of my senior
year. I had a good time teaching my peers just before I graduated. Some of the
students even told me that they learned more from me than from the French
teacher. If only I had been savvy enough then to realize that these students
knew me very well, compared to the vast number of students across the county
who neither knew me or even cared for me. I had the home-court advantage at
Torrance High School.
I was a tough instructor, so much so that the French teacher was worried
that I was alienating and intimidating students. Some of the students failed
outright. I did not let up even once on having high standards. Of course, I
also learned the hard way that having lots of hard questions on a test meant
for lots of grading when the tests were collected.
My French teacher was a lot of fun. She told me that I had to be lots of
fun, too, or students would not want to take French. It was well-known and
understood around campus that French was the party class, as opposed to the
Spanish classes, where the teacher could push their students harder without
worrying about declining enrollment.
French can attract the best students, or the laziest. One friend, Mel, told
me that French classes are the best to teach because you can get the best, the
most motivated students. In my experience, however, French students can be some
of the laziest. Bonjour, Paresse ("Hello, Laziness") was the
title of a best-selling book in France, one which described the ease with which
Frenchmen could live off the welfare state without doing any work. The book could
just as well have described the majority of French classes in Southern
California, where students are expected to do very little, because French
teachers fear alienating and intimidating their students with work and high
expectations, lest they drop the class and take woodshop or Spanish (sacré
bleu!)
I wanted to be a tough teacher. I wanted to be "old school", where
kids would do everything that I said, and there was nothing that they could do
about it. Unfortunately, I entered the teaching profession full-time at the
point when school districts were beginning to lose millions of dollars because
fiscal mismanagement and structural dysfunction. The cult of equality has taken
over, and sadly the students are the biggest losers, instilled with the misguided
sense of entitlement which has enabled them to talk back to instructors and
complain to the principal if they do not get their way. Over the past few years,
administrators have grown jittery because of lawsuits and interest groups which
advocate the self-esteem, not the future
prosperity, of the student. The cult of equality has engendered a culture of
disrespect, a wasteland of low expectations and lower teacher moral which has
frightened and disenchanted many teachers from pursuing what was a noble
calling.