School in a French village

[dawtheminstrel]

One of my former grad students is living in a tiny French village for a year. Her husband is French and they're both on academic sabbaticals. She's been blogging about the experience. Among other things, they live over a chocolate shop. But today she blogged about what school is like for her 6 and 8 year old sons. I thought it was really

Comments

[shirebound]

I enjoyed reading that very much!

[dawtheminstrel]

I did too. I think my student and her sons are brave to live somewhere they don't speak the language for a year. I'd be scared.

[perelleth]

Travel is fatal for prejudice, as Mark Twain put it. But I had to stop reading and start laughing at the " as a socialist country" because that's an hilarious way of evaluating a country's long term vision of its own society.. lolol.

It's lovely to see people adapt to different realities and finding out it is not as hard as it seems. 25 years ago the European Union started this Erasmus Program, allowing college students to spend a year abroad studying at a university in a different EU country and the results have been awesome in terms of the new generation acknowledging and embracing cultural and language diversity even within the EU. It's simply beautiful.

[dawtheminstrel]

I'm pretty sure she was joking about the "socialist" stuff by echoing our conservative politicians.

[perelleth]

I know, but if you take into account that it was Napoleon who set up the lycee sytem...its still hilarious! :-)

[dawtheminstrel]

In the Republican debate last week, Jeb Bush spoke scornfully of the "French work week," which he said was 3 days. Seriously. You can't make that stuff up.

[curiouswombat]

Sounds as if they are enjoying the experience and getting a really good all round education.

I am amazed at the hours the boys had to be at school back in the USA - starting at 8.00am is cruel! And no breaks apart from a short lunch? I'm sure it can't be good for them.

Not that our children have such good hours as the French ones - 4-7 year olds do 9.00am - 3.15pm with an hour for lunch and 2 x 15 minute playtimes. 8-11 year olds do an extra 15 minutes and finish at 3.30pm, but otherwise the same as the smaller ones.

[dawtheminstrel]

American children almost all ride school buses, which the grade schools and high schools share. They stagger the hours so the bus can make two round trips both morning and night. It sometimes results in strange things. My DIL's first grade class had lunch at 10:30 last year.

[dot_o_choillmor]

So interesting! Jeepers, they're brave. But it sounds like they'll end up very happy. I hope so anyway. For me it was also fascinating to see the comparisons to the American schools and way of living because that's foreign to me too.

[dawtheminstrel]

I thought they were amazingly brave to do this, especially with the boys in school. The first day of school was traumatizing for her, though the boys did well. I wonder whether she's lonely.