French Lessons: A Memoir (16 page)

The latest hope of language teachers involves abandoning
drills in favor of what they call "communication in context."
Put flesh on the bare bones of pedagogy, they say; if you can
create a viable fictional world in which language students
can participate, their second language will have both use
and meaning.

The first day I went in the classroom to teach French, I was
a nervous wreck. The lesson was about saying hello. These
were my instructions: the teacher is a moving target, maintaining a constant flow of correct French. I was supposed to
say hello to each student in a variety of French ways, shake
hands, get them to say hello back. I was supposed to move
around the room and keep moving, so the students' eyes
would keep darting after me. I was so sure that my French
was incorrect that I asked Beatrice Abetti, the assistant at the
language lab, to go out to lunch with me beforehand and
listen to me in French and assure me that I could teach. I was
remembering Madame Holmgren and how mean we were
about her-racist, it suddenly dawned on me as I thought
about it, in my sophisticated graduate student way. Too late:
now I was Madame Holmgren, human loudspeaker, my
body up front, the living breathing example.

I was trained to teach according to the Capretz method, in
the "sink or swim" tradition. Every week Pierre Capretz
would present an episode in the ongoing story of Robert
and Mireille, and we, the new teachers, would spend the subsequent week assimilating it with our class. No English is
spoken, ever. There are no exercises in translation. When I
taught it, the Capretz method existed only in the form of
mimeographed booklets and weekly multimedia shows in
the Yale language lab. It has now been expensively produced in video format, on location, using professional actors; it has been broadcast several times on educational TV.
Some of my friends have the Capretz tapes on their VCR.
Like Fonda exercises you can use to get your French in
shape.

The story is the usual light romance: Robert, an American
student, goes to France to study at the Sorbonne and meets
Mireille, a Parisian. The grammar is woven into the plot. The
week we study families is also the week we study possessive
pronouns: my uncle, your father, her sister. As for the story
itself, we can reinvent it, recombine the elements, make the
plot turn new ways. I ask the class, "What if Mireille hadn't
walked out onto the street at that moment, would she have
met Robert?" "No, she wouldn't have met him": presto,
they're practicing the past conditional and the placement of
the direct object pronoun. I put them in dialogue with one
another: one is Robert, calling Mireille on the phone. Then
the reverse. The class loves making the sounds that aren't
language: sirens, telephones, French ducks that say "quin
quin" instead of "quack." Students start dressing like Robert
and Mireille, talking like them, anticipating their every
move.

The Capretz method reproduces the conditions by which
a student on her junior year abroad might learn French language and culture, by hearing the constant flow of correct
French and by being in situations in French, complete with
background noise and the emotional dilemmas that come from the push and pull of everyday conversation. On a Capretz test, students will listen to a loudspeaker announcement in a department store over the din of the shoppers,
and will have to make it out. Or they'll have to decipher the
words to a song, or one-liners in a stand-up comic's routine.
Unlike immigrants, for whom these situations are traumatic, the students can practice the scenes over and over
again in class. The student situations are vaudeville romantic. No one is unemployed or hungry. No one will flunk a
citizenship test or be sent back to Ellis Island.

This method always appealed to me. It corresponds to
what I liked best about being in France: being-in-situation
with language, every new event and personality in life a
chance to try something out. Only with the method it's a
story, not real life. And I, Madame, control it, I set the game
working: I'm the school driver, the one who picks them up
at the airport and shows them the way home.

Teaching, I discover, is not really about my French, my
body, and whether or not they're correct. It's about generating words-other people's words. Making people change,
making them make mistakes, making them care and not
care, making them sensitive, but not oversensitive, to the
nuances of language. Making them take risks. It is physical,
shockingly physical. Not just because I am there, walking
across the room so their eyes won't fall asleep, but because I,
Madame, have to make their mouths work. I walk up to a
student and I take her mouth in my hand; I arrange it in the
shape of a perfect O. Too close, a little too close to repeat.

Occasionally I divide our bodies in half, our left side
speaking English, our right side speaking French so we can
feel the difference in our posture, our hands, our muscles.
Our English side slouches, while our French side is crisp and pointed. In English we gesture downwards with one
hand, in French our entire arm is in a constant upward
movement. With our French side, we shake imaginary dirt
from our hand with a repeated flick of the wrist, to show we
are impressed, scandalized, amused. This is interesting, to
be double like this with them, and funny enough for comfort. Also from Capretz I learn to teach tricks that no one
ever taught me for making French sounds. For the "r," gargling with mouthwash to feel the vibration in your throat.
This tells you where the French "r" is, until finally you can do
it without the aid. Making the "u" sound-the "u" in "tu" or
"fondu" or "bu," that most French of French sounds-is a
three-part pedagogy. First you say "o" with your mouth in a
perfect round (as though you were going to peck someone
on the check), then "eee" (with your mouth stretched out in
a horizontal smile like a trout, or a wide pumpkin), then a
combination of the two: with your mouth in the shape of a
perfect "o," you say "ee." The sound "u" comes out. This
works well.

The Capretz method depends on students not making
things up, it teaches them to absorb and recycle ready-made
bits of language. It asks them to listen to the tapes in the lab
and let the story of the week sink in, like a hit song that you
listen to in the car on your way into work and end up knowing in spite of yourself. This is hard. American students want
A's for originality. They can't believe that language isn't theirs
to remake. They compensate with theatricality: by the end
of a good semester a Capretz class is a repertory theater; the
students, method actors. The extroverts learn French so
well by this method that it frightens me.

This is what teaching is like, too, knowing that you are
teaching better than you yourself ever learned, that you can get more from your students than you were ever capable of
giving. Teaching, if it succeeds, is dealing with the fact that
some of those hams will be better than you are.

"French wasn't like this for me," I murmur to myself as I
am teaching this miraculous Capretz method, "it was more
private, whispered." I remember the first poem I learned,
Victor Hugo's autumn poem, full of low hisses:

The poem is simple, and beautiful mostly for its sounds: a
hissing of the north wind in the "s"s, just enough to blow
some leaves off the trees. A "u" sound hidden in the last line.
And the "ar" sound in the last word, "part," it has a nice sliding away sound to me. My mouth feels good when I say it.
I'm not tired of it, even though I once listened to two hundred students recite it for one of those Alliance Francaise
events where the local high school students come to the
university to "declaim" Hugo and Baudelaire. I feel religious
about it, because of having known it before I knew what it
meant.

My friends in public school who had the Audio-Lingual
Method dialogues could all recite the same scene they didn't understand-about a tailor, I think. At my girls'
school we had Mauger's Cours de langue et de civilisation francaise a I'usage des strangers, a series of blue books put out by
the Alliance Francaise, the worldwide organization that promotes French language and civilization. In the introduction
to my copy of Mauger, copyrighted 1953, French is described as a language for the elites, useful and beautiful:
"French uplifts and it serves." The Mauger story follows the
Canadian Vincent family as they embark on a visit to see
their friends the Legrands in France. They take a boat-a
paquebot. Their friend is a bookseller, has a maid who serves
dinner. They eat frequently in Paris-12:30 in a restaurant;
tea at 4; dinner at home at 7:4S.

It's unfair to complain that people in language books are
eating too much; it takes a few meals, at least, to show the
difference between a definite and an indefinite article. (I
would like the pie versus I would like some pie). Besides
which, everyone eats, and not everyone lays bricks, operates printing presses, or looks at amoebae under microscopes. Everyone needs the words for food.

It amuses me that I now know the extraneous words, the
minor details in the black and white drawings of French
rooms in the Mauger book. What social class is being represented. What neighborhood in Paris they might live in. I recognize the Henri IV dining room set, the traversin pillow
across the bed. I know that French intellectuals, French executives prefer to work at desks with no drawers like the
one in the Legrands' study. The places where the food is sold
are places I have been-disappearing now, of course-the
butcher shops where the rabbits hang with their fur and the
sausages look like necklaces. The grammar tables in the back of the book, too, are inscribed in my mind like so many separate boutiques: the er verbs, then their verbs, the verbs conjugated in the past with "titre" instead of "avoir." It took
forever to acquire these details, a whole adulthood, it
seems, and I'm not done. Time enough for the France they
inhabit to be gone: Mauger's grammar looks as dated to me
now as those fifties Robert Doisneau photographs, where
the French men wear berets and frayed overcoats in their
postwar leanness. It's a France as old as pissoirs and
segregated-sex lycees and women just getting the vote.
France before Les Halles was torn down. France without a
single fast food, France still hungry.

A different kind of landmark: in 1966 I first heard the
word "existentialism." I was at the Vanderveers' house, and
Priscilla's brother, a senior in high school, was writing a paper for his seminar in Great Ideas. It was the longest word I
had ever heard. French was this, too, always-even in beginning French classes you knew there was a France beyond
the everyday, a France of hard talk and intellect, where God
was dead and you were on your own, totally responsible.

In the summer of 1968 I went to French camp in Bar Harbor, Maine, and read Camus's The Stranger for the first of
many times. At camp there was a rule that if you were caught
speaking a word of English you would get a "mauvais point,"
a black mark. For every mauvais point you would have to
memorize a certain number of verses of French poetry before you were allowed to go into town. I don't remember
the poetry (Baudelaire, probably) but I have an exact memory of the lobster I ate when I was released from recitation.
Once I was caught speaking English with a nightgown over
my head-I slipped the nightgown down and there was the
monitrice, pencil in hand, grinning.

Why grinning? Why are these language teachers always
grinning, glinting, mocking? There is something sadistic
about language teaching that works. You assume the authority, and along with it, the sadism. You give or withhold the
smile.

Language teaching is badly paid, little recognized, and
much maligned. It is left up to native speakers for whom it is
stupidly thought to be "natural," therefore too easy to be of
much value. Ph.D.'s want to move on from language teaching to the teaching of literature, and theories of literature.
Language teaching is too elemental, too bare. You burn out,
generating all that excitement about repetition, creating
trust, listening, always listening. In literature class you can
lean back in the seat and let the book speak for itself. In language class you are constantly moving, chasing after sound.