Thu, 2 September 2010
Education
Pre-school
All I really need to know (about the French) I learned in...
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How colouring inside the lines helps to defend the French social model and other perplexing questions for the expat parent.14 May 2007
If you adhere to the 'All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten' approach to life, then you'll cut me some slack on the argument I'm about to make, which is going to reduce much of a great nation's behaviour to the child's relationship to the colouring book.
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I had this flash of inspiration while recently talking to a veteran expat mother, and family friend, who raised her two sons here before returning to the US some 20 years ago.
I went to her for advice on schooling because her children were the same age on arrival in France as my children on our arrival…and one of her sons still, to this day, agrees vociferously when my son lets loose with his favourite gross cultural generalization: "French teachers are mean." What's more, these two Franco-American sons share this idea for the same reason, the thing that has become the bête noire of my son's life, the activity that prompted my son the other day to declare himself "doomed!": handwriting.
(I tried to explain to him that, in terms of academics, no seven-year-old who can use the word "doomed" correctly in a sentence, in two languages, can possibly be doomed. But he seemed unconvinced.)
My mom-friend first realized something was off at her son's sixth birthday party when the other [French] kids made a point of commenting on his inability to colour inside the lines. She wondered to herself: Why ever would a six-year-old care about another six-year-old's fine motor skills? Yet, in that mysterious ability of children to identify and horn in all subtle signs of someone else 'not fitting in', somehow they knew: this boy is not like us. (And, sure enough, he lives in America today.)
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