Back to School 2 (at least it’s better than being in an English family!)
On Charles Bremner’s excellent blog, there a good piece which unwittingly picks up the theme of my blog on Monday: how the mistrust (and possibly dislike) of the English starts at school. Charles’ blog is much more visceral – dealing with the experiences of French school children going to stay with English families – and it makes gruesome reading. I have to say it tallies absolutely with what the children I teach have told me – although they went to Ireland not England. The idea that families take in these children not out of interest or as one half of an exchange but almost professionally, to make money, shocks me. But not all the blame lies with the receiving parents: once the obligatory museum visit was over, the French teacher accompanying the kids from my area apparently left them every evening in down-town Dublin, telling them to make their own way to wherever their host family lived. He, considering himself off-duty (not paid to work more than 35 hours a week after all), then went to enjoy himself. Since “my” kids mostly live on isolated farms, the idea of finding their way from the centre of a capital city to the suburbs by public transport is….well, let’s be positive and say it’s a hands-on lesson in urban survival.
The kids’ interest in the whole affair was minimal from the start – their hard-working parents coughed up for them simply because all the other parents had and they felt honour-bound to keep up. By definition the ones I coach are on the low end of the learning curve (in fact more of a straight horizontal), and are incapable of fully understanding even a carefully phrased sentence in English, let alone replying. Their parents would never dream of taking them to a museum, let alone a foreign country, so their appreciation of those aspects was zero, even in French they didn’t have the vocabulary to describe it to me afterwards (the flight there was what they remembered most), so moaning about the food (and lack of it) and their hosts’ cold reception was all they could relate to. That was what tumbled out when their parents asked them “How was it?” The shock on their parents’ faces naturally encouraged them to expound further.