Second Joan

When I was thirty-four I found myself virtually penniless and in dire need of a job. My friend Bobbie Liebert informed me of an opening teaching kindergarten at the Woodmere Academy. I had a year of helping at Connie's nursery school so with the courage of ignorance I made an appointment with Dr. Ren for a Thursday afternoon.

When the good headmaster saw the year of university in Switzerland he inquired if I thought I could teach French to little children. After all it was not philosophy. I agreed with alacrity. I would have agreed to teach Greek, such was my need for money. He set an appointment for Monday with the head of the French department. It was up to me in this weekend to bring back what I had known fifteen years earlier. I watched French movies, practiced my pronunciation read aloud and memorized a little speech which anticipated what I believed would be asked by the head of department.

In September I met my first classes. We started in third grade the oral-aural approach. Kind of monkey-see monkey-do. It took about fifteen repetitions of a phrase for a child, even a very backward child to learn the phrase. One must always remember that the town idiot in places like Alsace speaks both French and German.

In fourth fifth and sixth grades the philosophy had been set at an earlier time and the children read and wrote French. They were also introduced to French culture. We ate French cheese and drank French hot chocolate until the principal accused me of bribing the children with food. I acknowledged a little "Skinner M and M" psychology and said I found nothing wrong with equating French with food. The whole world equates French with food.

As part of the culture lessons we talked of Guillaume le Conquerant, and Richard Coeur de Lion. We spoke of 1066 and all That. I encouraged them to think of all those French nouns and verbs swimming across the Channel and in so doing losing their French accent and becoming English. One could add hundreds of vocabulary words by putting the accent on a different syllable. Some of them got it and tried the French accent whenever they were short of learned vocabulary.

One day I told my fifth grade class all about the burning of Joan at the stake. Children love gore. A child in the front row asked "Had I known her well?" Yes I had known her well.