I Wanted to be a Teacher -- French

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.