French Toast (18 page)

Sometimes there is a lack of communication between a teacher and the parents. But generally you can get everything worked out via a little notebook the children are given at the beginning of the year. In it, the teacher can write things such as “David was very noisy in class today. This must cease.” In this way, parents are aware of what is going on in the class. This is handy, because French schools are definitely not open houses. The teachers' job is to teach, the administrators' to administrate, and the parents' to keep their distance unless specifically invited to the school.

Sometimes we American mothers don't understand certain punishments that seem to be par for the course.
My friend Jan was furious because her daughter, age nine, had been made to stand up for forty-five minutes in the corridor as a punishment. I related the story to my son David, then age fourteen. “So what's the problem?” he asked philosophically. “That used to happen to me all the time.” That was the first wind I had ever had of that!

It's true that, by American standards, French teachers can be hard on students. They don't mince their words. They're not afraid of the school board! A teacher in a French school will not hesitate to tell a kid that he is a lousy, terrible student with no future, and what is he doing in her class, anyway? My niece, while taking her oral exams at the Sorbonne, was told by a professor that she hoped that her other grades were good, because, she said, “with the grade I'm giving you, you'll need all the help that you can get.”

In a French school, work has to be really special to get an
A
. French teachers mark from zero to twenty, with twenty being an almost inaccessibly high mark. When last in Iowa, a math teacher in my former high school told me that if he dared give a
C
- or, heaven help him, anything lower, the parents would bring the matter up with the school board, and he would get fired. An elementary school teacher in Arizona told me she quit her job because she had been giving
C
's to the children in her class who weren't doing well, and since many of them were Hispanic, she was accused of discrimination.

In France, this political correctness—or fear for your job if you don't hand out good grades—is nonexistent. In fact, at two different schools where I taught, I was asked to redo my grades and downgrade them. The director called me in and apologized: “I know that in America you tend to give high grades, but, you see, here the curve is much lower.” I didn't protest. It's their system. A colleague told me that the director of a very prestigious school he taught in personally administered a dressing-down to the faculty for the high marks they were giving their remarkably gifted students. “We can't have any more of this,” he yelled. A faculty member responded ironically, “Why don't we just give them all
C
's and
D
's in that case?” But that's the system. One must aim for perfection.

Yet there are few complaints. French students are used to seeing an
A
or
A
+ as an almost unattainable goal, and when they do finally get a high mark, they know it means something.

Of course you need high standards in a country where only a chosen few will make it to the very top—the
grandes écoles
. Many French parents, like many American parents, have big ambitions for their kids from the time they set foot in kindergarten. (I realize this is true on the East Coast of the United States; we were spared this pressure in Iowa.) I'll never forget Claudie, my son's kindergarten teacher, telling me, “You're so different from the other parents.” I asked, “Why?” She
said, “Because you just want your son to have a good time and you aren't pushing him.” I replied, “Why would I push the kid? He's only five, after all.” And she responded, “Oh, there are parents who want Pierre to go to
Polytechnique
and are already putting on the pressure.”

“What's
Polytechnique
?” I asked. I don't remember her answer, but I do remember that it took me years to understand the French system of
grandes écoles
, of which
Polytechnique
is one of the most, if not the most, prestigious. Now that my twenty-year-old is in one of these schools, I at long last understand the
grandes écoles
system but find myself in serious trouble when trying to explain it to my American family. It's so typically French!

In a nutshell, the
grandes écoles
were created by Napoléon to form a corps of elites. These schools are different from the university because any student with his baccalaureate degree from high school can go to the university. This means that universities are overcrowded and that many students give up and drop out. In contrast, students entering the
grandes écoles
have gone through a rigorous selection process, notably two years of preparatory school after the baccalaureate. During these two years, they prepare to take the stiff qualifying exams that will determine if they get in a
grande école
and which school they qualify for. Classes in the
grandes écoles
are smaller, and once you get in, it is highly unusual to flunk out.

One day, after my sister had insisted on Benjamin's coming to the United States for a year, I could see that she didn't understand that he
couldn't
, because if you are on this track in France, you can't get off it, and so I tried to explain all of this to my family.

“Yes, you see, Benjamin graduated from high school but there was no graduation ceremony, no gowns, no music, no prom, no diploma handed out. His high school diploma, in fact, was mailed to him several months later. And since his grades in math during school and on the baccalaureate exam [and then I had to explain that this is a national exam that all French kids take prior to leaving high school] were excellent, he qualified for a prep school, so in two years he can take exams to try to get into what the French call a
grande école
.”

At about this point, my family members started getting mystified. If he's so good, why didn't he just go on to the university? No, I explained, in France, it's the reverse of what happens in the United States: If you're really good, you
don't
go to the university. You go to a special prep school where there's a steady diet of math and science for the kids who are excellent in scientific studies, or literature for kids who excel in the arts, and after a two-year grind, the ones who are left take competitive exams to enter the
grandes écoles
.

This explanation sparked a flicker of interest from my mom, who, as a former teacher, is very interested
in education in general and my sons' education in particular.

“And where is this preparatory school he is attending?”

“It's in a high school, Mom,” I said, and I suddenly realized this whole thing appeared too strange to be real. My son had graduated from high school and was now studying in a high school. . . . I could see by the look on her face that she was confused.

“In a high school?” she said.

“Yes, it's in a high school.” I beamed. “But of course these are no longer high school students, so they have entirely separate classes. They are in classes from about nine
A.M
. to six
P.M
. five days a week and on Saturday morning, and they have a minimum of three hours of homework after school. Twice a week, they have what the French call ‘
colles
' [oral exams]. They are given a really difficult topic and have to discourse on it for an hour. When they're not in school, they are at home doing their homework. They have no time for outside activities.”

I took a deep breath. “
But
, at the end of the two years, after they have suffered through this grind and are but pale fragile remnants of what they once were, they have been thoroughly trained to take these stiff exams. Depending on the score they get, they will be admitted to the best schools in the nation. For those who want to be teachers or researchers, this school
would be the
École Normale Supérieure
followed by
Polytechnique
for engineering. And once they get into these schools, they can relax and cool it and kind of do what they want.”

“Oh, I didn't know Benjamin wanted to be an engineer!”

“He doesn't, Mom. But in France, if you're smart and good in math, and even if you don't want to be an engineer, you have to follow this track, because if not, you would go off to the university with everyone else, and classes at the university are overflowing. No one pays any attention to you there, and when you get out, your diploma is worth almost nothing.”

“My goodness! But what does Benjamin want to do?”

“He doesn't really know. He thinks he wants to be a teacher. But all this is immaterial at this point. What he has to do is go through the preparatory classes, pass his exams, and make it into a
grande école
. Then he will be able to choose.”

“He will make it of course, but, well, what if he didn't?”

“Then he would have to go to the university with everyone else.”

My mother by now was totally lost, and I realized that she must have thought that her grandson had probably flunked out of high school and was doing some kind of remedial course somewhere.

Of course, it's just the opposite. Having taught in the
grandes écoles
, I can affirm that the kids who are there are the crème de la crème in terms of standing up under pressure, working like dogs, and assimilating an enormous amount of information.

Los Angeles Times
correspondent Stanley Meisler, who lived in France for five years, puts it better than I do: “The best graduates of the French educational system have a precision of mind, command of language and store of memory that would make the heart of most American educators ache with envy. It is doubtful that any school system in the world teaches more logic and grammar or offers more courses.”

However, he adds—and this is indeed the catch—“. . . a sobering price is paid. Precision in thought and beauty of language are the products of an elite French school system that is repressive, frightening and stifling to many pupils who cannot keep up. There is no tolerance or time for spontaneity or weakness.”

My younger son decided to opt for the university route, so now I will be able to compare the
grande école
system and the university system from personal experience and not just hearsay. What I can see for the moment is that while my elder son's struggle was limited to the two grueling years of
prépa
before he entered his
grande école
, the challenge for my younger will be to find his place within a system in which thousands of students are enrolled and no one is going to pay any particular attention to them. In the university system,
the route the vast majority of French students take, students have little to no contact with professors, don't live on a campus, and have to sink or swim in a system in which they are just a number. In spite of this, I'm optimistic and believe that each will receive an excellent education. Whether a
grande école
or a university, education in France is excellent. It just isn't all that easy, but as you will see in the interview with Philippe, making things easy for students apparently isn't a value in the French educational system.

Before I started teaching in France, I had no idea that when you get in front of a class, you are supposed to wipe that smile off your face and look serious. I was in for a big surprise.

If you go into a classroom in France, you will probably see that the teacher's desk is on a raised platform. In most cases, the teacher is not conceived of as an equal and is always addressed with the polite
vous
.

French students think of a teacher as someone who should have a certain dignity and be thought of as a bit above them. They look at you like you're a nutcase if you indulge in “unprofessorial” behavior. I know. In the courses I gave at the
Institut d'Études Politiques
(the French equivalent of the London School of Economics), I would very naturally gesticulate, grimace, and smile to
make a point. As I did so, I could see the students in front of me knitting their brows and laughing nervously. They were clearly puzzled.

By the same token, I have been stymied over the years by students (generally women, for some odd reason) whose facial expressions indicate either extreme boredom or extreme disapproval (with me? with the class?). Each time, it turned out that there was no particular problem—it was just their normal nonsmiling expression. Apparently, smile = idiot.

In any case, French students just don't take a smiling teacher seriously. An American teacher of English in the
grandes écoles
system told me that she had failed a student, first of all because he had not even attended the number of classes required to get a minimum passing grade and, second, because when he did make it to class, he made no effort at all to participate. When he discovered that she had actually failed him, he was furious—not just because of the grade but because he didn't understand how badly he had been doing.