A Room of One's Own

After much foot-dragging, I have finally established a permanent-ish online home. This website will host selections of my work, written and otherwise, and will be added to and expanded over time.

Bonne lecture, as the French say.

Image: Cais das colunas, Lisbon © Oliver Farry 2013

oliverfarry.com

Public Blogging

Last summer I posted on La Petite Anglaise, the blog written by a Parisian 34-year-old English expat woman (her identity has since been revealed as Catherine Sanderson) and her sacking for gross misconduct as a result of her blogging. Last Friday however she was absolved by an Employment Tribunal and her former employers, accountancy firm Dixon Wilson have been ordered to pay a year's wages as compensation for unfair dismissal as well as the unemployment benefit that Sanderson had been receiving since her sacking.

Sanderson is not the first to have lost her job as a result of her blogging and in her case the sacking was egregiously unfair as the references to her job or her workplace were both rare and suitably oblique. There is little on this blog that would be likely to jeopardise my own employment (except perhaps for an admission a few months back that I am not the world's greatest teacher); that said I have told nobody at my current job about this blog, mainly because it is nice for there to be a space in my life where it doesn't exist. Everyone at my old place of work knows about it (and one or two read it regularly) but in an age where people surrender their anonymity willingly online it is a pleasure to lurk in the background for a change.

Thoughts on French Students and Stationery

French students sure do like their stationery; even the adults that take a couple of hours off work for my classes, many of whom have pitifully low prospects of moving their English along, turn up with foolscap jotters free of any dog ears, a selection of pens and pencils, pencil sharpeners and something I haven't seen since I was about fourteen: pencil cases. And their hand-writing is nearly always very good too.

Airbust

Big news here in France is the decision by Airbus to cut 10,000 jobs across Europe, 4,500 of them in la Hexagone. It may also have an effect, albeit a slim enough one, on Seanachie's employment. Many of my students these days are people involved in aviation, from unemployed airline pilots to air-traffic controllers to numerous people from Corsair who are hell-bent on using their training entitlements to learn English (or 'Globish', as I prefer to call the dialect they learn) and get a job elsewhere. Then there is the young aeronautical engineering student, who is also an aspiring pilot, who is currently taking classes in order to pass a job interview (held, surprisingly in English) to get a year-long internship with the company. Whether he will be still up for an interview after today is questionable. I'll find out tomorrow. But then again it's hardly as if cutting interns is going to be a huge cost saving measure.

Those That Can't, Teach

I had been warned by a number of people that have worked as English teachers in the past that my level of English will be affected by daily exposure to people that mangle it despite their best efforts and intentions. I cannot say that that has happened just yet but neither can I say that I find the process too rewarding. Rather I find it painful listening to some of the awful constructions put on the language by some of my poor students. I have empathy with them but it is undeniable that I do ultimately resent having to listen to some of the excruciatingly bad English. Most of the worst is spoken by some of the brighter, more confident students, who both over-estimate their own ability at speaking the language and under-estimate the difficulty, the Protean nature, of the meanings and figurativeness of English.

This sounds churlish, I suppose; you might point out that my efforts in another language might provokes similar pain in another. That is true but my French is better than the English of probably 90% of my students (which is no surprise as I have far greater opportunity of speaking a second language than they have), and neither have I ever taken a French class, other than at school. I learned it on my own and my mangling of the language took place in a free-range environment, in shops, in bars, on the street, on public transport, in bed even. No poor teacher ever had to suffer on my account.

My first couple of months of teaching has taught me one thing, that most education and training is irredeemably compromised and necessarily shoddy. And doomed to failure. We do what we can but as Bernard Shaw infamously said of teachers, 'those that can't, teach'. There is a greater justice in that slur than is widely imagined. Most teachers, even with the greatest will and talent in the world are incapable of teaching most people. Only little slivers of knowledge will permeate the average student's conscience. We mustn't grumble all the same.

Nothing To Write About

It's my customary Tuesday-Wednesday blimp; two horribly long days where I am incapable of honouring any social commitments and which cause me to make painfully long Metro journeys to businesses west of Paris. And I have absolutely nothing to write about. The football tonight was largely inconsequential and dull. I wanted to do something about www.mydeathspace.com, the website devoted to deceased MySpace members, but, for some reason the site is down at the moment. There is also the story about thirty-odd death-row inmates from Texas having MySpace pages, which are maintained by their relatives (the inmates have no right to Internet access), one of whom is convicted copkiller Randy Halprin, but his page, though it can be viewed here, has apparently been deleted. Conflicting reports claim that MySpace has done the bidding of the State of Texas, though MySpace denies this. In the absence of anything to write about, I will do the dishes and put the rubbish out.

Goodbye Mr Chips

There have been grumbles from some over my absence from this blog over the last week; the truth is I have rarely had the time to sit down and do anything, and when the time was there the motivation had escaped me completely. My disillusion with my new job has arrived, not unsurprisingly, a couple of months after I have begun. I am overworked and because of this the quality of the classes I give has diminished. It does not help either that too many of the students I have this week are much too weak for comfort. And some of them are not that smart either, in the sense that they are making mistakes that should be easily diagnosable to them given that the mistakes hold for French too. It sounds crass and mean-spirited of me to talk about my students in this way though I have been exemplary thus far in holding my cool. I can understand how daunting it can be for mild-mannered middle-aged professionals to take a week off work to take twenty hours of one-on-one classes, only to make piddling progress in those five days. But even when the will is there it is difficult to move anyone beyond faux-elementary level when their understanding of the Present Continuous is so ropey and their inability to use their commonsense to decipher the simplest of crossword puzzles is so stark.

That many of my students have few English speakers they come into contact with regularly other than me compounds things further. A friend of mine suggested that bringing them out for a drink might help; an insane suggestion - why should I suffer further pain in my spare time when it is impossible enough when I am on the payroll and nominally motivated? One class whose invitations I have accepted on one or two occasions has now produced individual invitations to events I have not the slightest interest in honouring and which I even feel resentful at being forced to make a decision on. That is surely my problem: I am far too selfish to be a teacher, I really care only for myself and the only students of mine that really benefit from my teaching are the stronger ones. If classes drag and my resolution wavers then the poor weaker students are damned, inadvertently.

I spend far too much of my midweek either on the Metro or preparing to travel somewhere. I have even lost interest in playing my Saturday morning football, being far more attracted by a second morning lie-in. And nothing gets done, the laundry basket remains full, the flat is not hoovered, bank appointments are let slip, I continue wearing the same industrially-worn loafers to work because I have no time to waste trying on newer models. It's not all doom and gloom though, I can assure you.