My senior citizen French class continued to be a thing of wonder yesterday.
The instructor, like many of us, is elderly and frail. He needs but doesn’t wear hearing aids. He is always yelling at us if we talk amongst ourselves, because he can’t make out what anyone is saying. He yells unpredictably but peevishly, and the students being yelled at tend to look at him with a fixed gaze while he does it, and then go on about their lives, unperturbed. We are old. We don’t care. People have yelled at us before. We yell at other people ourselves.
Class is run in the old-fashioned and ineffective way of much of the teaching I received decades ago, which is to say there is brief instruction from the textbook, we do exercises for homework and share them one by one in class either orally or on the board, the instructor corrects us, and periodically he has us do dictation or come up with on-the-spot sentences. Sometimes he teaches us idioms. Other times, he rambles on about how people don’t pronounce things correctly in French or in English these days.
I have a master’s and a doctorate in teaching and 30 years of experience. My own teaching was a much more complex process, designed to trick my students into doing the work of actually learning something by participating actively, but I am not teaching the class, so I officially do not care.
Like many instructors, ours believes in correcting our mistakes. He corrects every mistake he detects. He gives us conflicting instructions, and then we get confused and produce increasingly madcap and ungrammatical constructions. He plays “gotcha!” and his confused students aren’t sure why they got it wrong. Sometimes he does it when they get it right, too, because he can’t hear well.
Meanwhile, the variety and range of incomprehension of his students, many of whom have taken their class for years, is remarkable. It is impossible to convey how badly many of us pronounce the language. Others who have passable accents are wading through the soggy weeds of grammar with all the will in the world, but absolutely no understanding.
And yet we are, for the most part, jolly as hell.
One member of the class was celebrating his 89th birthday this week, and he brought cookies. The instructor brought cookies too, but for St. Patrick’s Day. Many people were wearing green.
The instructor played “Gotcha!” with me by getting me to conjugate the verb “faire” because he knows people always get tripped up by the 2nd person plural/formal, and though I got it wrong once again, I corrected myself, laughed, and said, “I always get it wrong!”
“I’ll bet you get it right from now on?” he said impishly.
I considered the thought. “No,” I said, and everyone laughed.
The Russian woman student tends to set people off because (a) she sits grimly in front staring directly at the instructor, (b) she has opinions (c) she expresses them bluntly and coldly and (d) she speaks decent French, but with a Russian accent. The instructor once demanded of her, “Do you want to teach the class?” and she was not fazed. She said no, she didn’t. She continued to defend her opinions, nonetheless.
I went out of class yesterday briefly, and when I came back in, one of the sweetest people in class was telling off the Russian woman for disparaging something she said. Everyone listened cautiously. Then we all got back into sharing homework sentences. The Russian woman turned her searchlight attention back to the instructor, and the sweet lady ruffled her feathers slightly and settled into her nest again.
“Well, that was a spicy class today,” I said as I was departing to a classmate, a gentleman with a truly execrable French accent who hasn’t been in class for six weeks until today.
“It sure was,” he said, and we went our separate ways into the sunny day, both of us still apparently alive if not particularly more fluent in French.