At 8am this morning, I corralled myself out of bed and down to the cafeteria. It wasn’t difficult, because I can see the cafeteria from my bedroom window. The task ahead was simple. The kids, 14/15 year olds, were to eat a traditional British breakfast and then embark on finding their perfect flatmate based on profiles each had been given. I was to walk around and generally help out, and speak in English.
The breakfast was nice. None of the kids copied my milky tea routine, and there were no coffee mugs around. The children were a bit confused by my apparent worry at being asked to drink my morning tea from a cereal bowl. They were not convined by the tea, and returned to their hot chocolate in bowls. I felt like a diplomatic failure.
The breakfast consisted of Coco Pops, eggs, toast, bread, and lots of jam. Someone even brought along some American maple syrup. A few people had brought along French breakfast cakes (best idea EVER), chocolate cakes, actual muffins, and crepes. Unsurprisingly, the children mostly stuck with the cakes, as did the teachers. I stayed with my boiled egg spread on toast and my milky tea in a bowl. Oh, immigrant life.
After this little feast, the children were released to begin trying to find their perfect flatmate. It quickly became apparent that they had been allowed to write their own profiles, and that the fake wanted ads had also been written by them. I found a French- American girl with absolutely perfect English. She had been honest in her profile, saying that she was a non-smoker who didn’t like having big pets in the house. She was a minority, and could not find a flatmate. Most of the adverts asked for rent to be paid in chocolate, alcohol, or slavery. She had come equipped with a budget of £250/$200 per month.
I milled around a bit, chatting to various groups. Before long, as luck would have it, I found one who had described himself as a junkie from southern Los Angeles in his advert. I asked him if he was actually a junkie.
‘No!’ he laughed, drawing out the ‘o’ sound, with the usual hybrid American-French accent that the kids have. ‘I am a junkie from the south side of the city of Los Angeles, and nobody wants to live with me!’ This was met with general applause and laughter by the small group around us.
‘Do you know what a junkie is?’ I asked.
‘Yes!’
‘Are you an addict?’
‘No, no, but, well, I was being creative, and L.A. is full of drugs, but nobody parties hard enough to live with me!’ Upon further inspection, it turned out that this kid was a huge fan of the Red Hot Chili Peppers. Apparently that band did a lot of heroin in Los Angeles in the 80’s, and the kid noted this because of their music.
It always comes back to this…
I have to admit, though, these kids can speak English. It makes me ashamed of the UK’s education system. Why don’t we teach our kids languages properly? How is it that I, having passed Standard Grade, Higher, and two years of degree level French still can’t speak that language the way that 14 year old state-educated French children can speak English? And A., my German flatmate, says that the kids in Germany are even better. She says that the French are lagging behind, and N. agrees.
Up until this morning, I didn’t know the French for junkie. Even if I had wanted to, I’d have struggled explaining to someone in French that I was a junkie from the south side and that I had decided upon this career path based on the work of Antony Keidis’ ghostwriter.
All of this made me think. Trainspotting made me think. Why don’t we learn languages? It can’t just be that it’s because our language is hegemonic. French was hegemonic 100 years ago, and they were still polyglot despite their dominance. The Germans love German, but are acutely aware (and kind of proud) that Germany is the only place in the world where it is spoken.
Do we see it as boring? Do we see it as pointless? What’s with the ‘us and them’? Our system has left me embarrassed for the kids in our schools. God only knows what the European assistants there must think of us. God only knows what the teachers here think of my atrocious Changetalks routine, and the students too. I am an embarrassment to the United Kingdom.
Should I have tried harder? Should I have done more work? Is it my fault the very first time I heard about the French subjunctive was in the first year of Advanced French at university? Is it my fault that I got a Higher B in French without knowing the passé composé, the simple past tense? How has this happened?
More importantly, why isn’t anyone fixing it? The other British assistants here struggle as I do, even the ones who have studied French for years. There are, as always, wonderful exceptions, but we all generally stutter and say the wrong thing a lot.
I don’t want to pass the buck onto the education system for my own case. I don’t want to blame them, because I could have done more. But that’s just me. In fifth year, I didn’t know the past tense. It was in my grammar book, but I never sought it out. I was never advised to. We depend on our teachers to guide and to teach us. Is that too much to ask?
I remember the French teacher I had most in school. She was an Irishwoman who didn’t like me. Her degree was in German. My other French teacher was a Spanish woman. You couldn’t learn German or Spanish in our school; that required a trip to a larger and better-funded school in Irvine. And the quality of teaching compared to here was just, well…galaxies, dimensions apart, for the worse.
Then again, the teachers here don’t have to deal with the kinds of children who attended my school. I was a little shit, I admit, but I was one of the ‘good’ kids. I tried a little and worked a little. I wasn’t violent, or mean to them about their personal lives. I was easy, as were my friends; but my word, were we a minority.
Maybe the education system isn’t to blame. Maybe it’s just us. It is dispiriting and it is depressing to think about; the school I work at here is not some superfunded glitzy institution. Most of the children are first or second generation immigrants. I met one who barely spoke French, a new Romanian girl; but her English was perfect. She was 14.
So why is it that the British can’t speak any language other than a widely-spoken mauling of their native tongue? Is it our education system, or is it our children, and the way we bring them up? When they become adults, what the hell is going to happen? We’ve given them no reflexivity, no reason to feel that being ignorant of all the other languages spoken is a crime. No reason to shake themselves from their ignorance. It’s a giant failure.
I’d love to say that more funding for language education would do it, but I don’t think that it would help. Those who wish to learn would do better, and not be international embarrassments; but they will be a vast, vast minority. It’s just us, and the way we live, that denies us the ability to wish that our country could be ranked among the good internationalists. We are all captains, and we have helped to tether one another to the prow of a sinking ship; but this is the only arena in which we are conscious of the true saying, ‘I am because we are’. We are lost and sinking and often alone.
We fucking suck.
