Barberesses

There are many things that are glamorous about living in France. My job as a teacher is not among them. I am an English assistant at a high school and a middle school in a little town about half an hour north of Toulouse, but as it turns out, that job description covers a lot of ground. Between the two schools, I work with ten English teachers, and since I'm an unusual resource there is no prescribed way to integrate me into their classrooms. As a result, my work life is unpredictable and varied, though it all focuses on teaching French students to hear and understand an American accent and on getting them to practice speaking. Sometimes I act as nothing more than a voice: I read the texts the teachers give me into a recorder or to the class. More often, though, I lead or co-lead class sessions, which requires a much larger skill set. A loud voice and an ability to understand English spoken with a thick French accent are key, as is the ability to quickly formulate questions that are not yes-or-no but that are nevertheless easy to respond to with a limited vocabulary. (Didn't know that was a skill, did you?)

So far the most satisfying class sessions have been ones during which the students had to struggle to understand what I was saying and I had to struggle to get them to understand. I know those students learned something. They may not remember how to say "Pilgrim," or what it means, but they will remember which sort of questions they can ask to get an answer they can understand. The hardest classes are those during which the students refuse to speak. Getting French teenagers who are tired or lazy to speak English to me instead of French to their friends is not fun. Challenging as it can be, I've learned to count any class where most students speak some English and prove that they have understood some English as a success.

Teaching English can also be pretty amusing, especially to someone who has spent eight years in classrooms trying to learn French. It is gratifying to hear that French students don't pronounce endings that should be pronounced; that they agree adjectives that shouldn't be agreed; that they confuse tenses. They struggle with the same things as American students do learning French, except inversely. Their logic can also have entertaining results; when asked, what is a person called who cuts women's hair?, one student responded, "a barberess." They also have a tendency to add h's at the beginning of words that begin with a vowel, out of precaution, I suppose, so I've been hearing a lot about "hairplanes" and "hair pressure."

I would like to end this post on a note of absurdity: just yesterday I stood in the front of the classroom reading a not-quite-authentic American menu out loud to a class of twelve-year-olds and having them repeat after me. It was a logical exercise -- it got everyone to practice pronunciation, and ordering off a menu is an important skill when you're in a foreign country. But man was it weird to watch a classroom full of many earnest voices intone "barbeque chicken sandwich -- deluxe club sandwich -- bacon cheddar burger" at me.

Carcassonne

I had the good fortune this past weekend to go to the medieval village of Carcassonne accompanied by a very nice history teacher from my school in Fronton. Carcassonne is the largest medieval village in Europe. Positioned high upon a promontory, it is enclosed by two ramparts and boasts a basilica and a castle (which has a wall of its own). Construction began there in Roman times, but it continued to be an important castle because of its position in the frontier between France and Spain. In the 1200s it was a stronghold of a group of religious dissenters called Cathars, and the village was abandoned when the French throne became strong enough to take power away from the provincial lords there. It also ceased to be a strategically important position when the border between Spain and France, which had been right next to the castle, moved south. It deteriorated little by little after that through neglect, until the reconstructive efforts of Eugène Viollet-le-Duc in the mid 19th century made it into the functioning tourist attraction it is now. That is not to say that it has been polished to false perfection; the charm of the village is that bits from every part of its history are visible. The basilica Saint-Nazaire et Sainte-Celse, for example, has both roman arches and gothic arches, and just below it there is an outdoor amphitheatre where concerts are held in the summertime. And the walls still taunt historians with their mysteries: in the castle’s main courtyard, a doorway mid-way up the wall shows where a stairway in the castle once led to a second storey above the courtyard that has since burned or crumbled. No one knows anymore what that storey looked like or what purpose exactly it served.

My favorite part of the village, though, is the legend of its name. It is said that an Arabic princess named Carcas ruled over the town. Charlemagne wanted to take it in his efforts to expand his empire south and besieged the city. After five years, things were looking pretty grim for Carcas and her people. They were almost out of food, and would not be able to withstand Charlemagne's siege much longer. But Carcas had an idea: they would feed all their remaining food, all the flour they could scrape together, to the one pig. Then, once it was nice and fat, they would catapult it over the wall onto the soldiers' encampment. The plan was successful: they hurled the fattened hog, their only hope, onto their besiegers, who, seeing that the town had such a well-fed pig to spare, thought that their cause was hopeless. If they had enough food on the inside to fling fat pigs willy-nilly, it would be years before they gave in. So Charlemagne and his men packed up camp and left. As they were leaving, the princess Carcas sounded her victory on the bells of the basilica: in French, "Carcas sonne" les cloches de la victoire.