Lessons Taught and Lessons Learned

I get a lot of questions from people back home and French people here about why I’m doing this. Leaving my home, friends and family for ten months without really looking back very often. Seems pretty crazy to some people. Sometimes one of those people is me, but not very often. Most of those people are the same ones who couldn’t understand why I chose to go to a small women’s liberal arts college nearly a thousand miles from home and looked even more flummoxed when I said I was double-majoring in French and History. “What on earth are you going to do with that?” It’s a legitimate question, but not one that I lose a lot of sleep over. The easy answer to all of those questions is really quite simple: I’m doing all of this because I love it.  

That’s the simple answer. There’s a little bit more to it, like the fact that I suspect that a love for language is just part of my genes. But honestly I don’t think that matters much. There's another big reason that I'm here in Paris, and that is for the teaching opportunities this program provides. I've wanted to be a teacher pretty much for as long as I can remember, and here I get to student-teach at actual French schools and give private English lessons to French students outside of school. This semester, I'm student-teaching one hour a week and then doing some English babysitting/tutoring four about five hours a week. All this with kids between the ages of 8 and 12 years old. At first, I wasn't sure I wanted to do the private lessons because I didn't think it would be very good for my own French language development. The truth is that some days, the kids I'm supposed to be teaching teach me as much (if not more) than I teach them.

I've got a couple of fun teaching stories to tell, but first we're going to talk about some grammar and stuff for a minute so you guys can understand the stories better (fellow language-lovers, feel free to skip down a paragraph or two). When I took Latin in high school, we talked about derivatives a lot. A derivative is a word in a modern language which is derived (comes from) a Latin root. Examples are words like the Latin "canis" meaning dog, becoming "canine" or other related words. There are Latin derivatives in pretty much every modern language. A cognate, however, is a totally different thing. A cognate is a word that translates across two modern languages because they have the same root. Examples between French and English are words like the French verbs "adorer" (to adore), "finir" (to finish), etc. There are tons of them. But there are also quite a few false cognates, words that look like English words that actually mean something different. The first ones that come to my mind are "attender" which means "to wait for" not what you think it means. "Assister" means to attend, another false cognate. These false cognates can get you into trouble sometimes when you're speaking to someone who isn't your professor. It works the same way for French students learning English, only the reverse.

Most of the cognate-related mistakes my students make are either entertaining or interesting from a language perspective. A couple of weeks ago I was teaching my regular Friday afternoon class, which consists of the teacher (first-year teacher, only about five or six years older than I am) and me, plus twenty 11-year-old boys. They're all good kids, but very high energy. It's like trying to teach a litter of puppies most days, all of them trying to get your attention at once because you're the shiny new toy they only get to play with once a week. It's cute, but can get a little frustrating. On this particular day, we were going over some new English vocabulary words. A lot of the words on the list were words they'd heard from their teacher a few times, but hadn't written them down before or seen how they are spelled. French uses different alpha-phonetic rules, so very often they'll see a word on paper and not realize it's a word they know because it's spelled differently than they'd expect. In this situation, the word giving them trouble (understandably) was "know". One of my boys looks at it written on the board, and says "Ms. Morgan, why do you uh, placer un 'k' avant the 'now'? I think you is make un error." (He says all this with a thick French accent, using French words when he doesn't know the English; it's a little adorable) When I pronounced the word correctly, all the boys knew the word, but were very confused as to why it didn't sound the way other similarly spelled words did. It started an interesting conversation, and made me think about English words differently. 

The next two stories are about situations where I was legitimately entertained, but couldn't really laugh because laughing at a kid learning a new language is a sure way to make the kid unsure and never speak in class again. Last week, the boys were learning about places and addresses. We were looking at a map of a neighborhood from their book. I'd say the name of a place like "library" and they'd try to find it on the map. I should interject here that in French, the word for "place" is "endroit", or sometimes "lieu". "Place" does exist in French, but it is only used in a street name capacity; for the most part, it is a "faux ami" (false friend), or false cognate. While we're doing the exercise, one of the boys raises his hand and says, "Excusez-moi, Madame, but where is the lieu we look for?" He tries to make his French word "lieu" sound more English, so it comes out sounding like "loo" (as in the bathroom). It was pretty funny, but I was able to gently correct him without giggling or anything.

This last story is just cute. It's semi-cognate related, but mostly just for fun. In my class, there's a kid named Pierre. At the beginning of the semester, I made a deal with the class that if they could ask the question in English, they could ask me anything they wanted. Pierre is always asking me questions. Sometimes they're personal questions (not really personal, just stuff about me and my family etc.) other times he and some of the chattier classmates like to use me as their own personal French-English dictionary. They've sort of run out of personal questions to ask, so mostly it's the latter these days. Knowing that I was in for an hour of "Ms. Morgan, what's the English for..." I thought I would bring my French-English dictionary with the idea that I could make a teachable moment out of all the questions; teach them a few new words and show them how to use a bilingual dictionary. The moment presents itself later, when Pierre inevitably asked me how to say "rendez-vous" in English. So I gave him the dictionary and showed him how to use it. "Rendez-vous" is a word that covers a lot of English words, like appointment, date, hanging out, meeting, etc. So after Pierre learns the word, there's a lot of rapid French whispering between him and his friends that I don't quite catch. Then he says, "Ms. Morgan, will you do a meeting with me this weekend?" This one I really laughed at, because there is no way I'm going to embarrass this kid into silence. What he meant to say was "go on a date" but because there are so many different words under "rendez-vous" it all came out wrong. Unfortunately the real teacher figured out what he was trying to say as well and he got in trouble. 

I'll save some of the other stories for another time. That's all for now!