French Twist (22 page)

Many French people value time spent with family and happiness over economic prosperity. In a 2010 study, they had the best record for using all of their vacation days; this is saying a lot, as they have the most generous allotment in the developed world. Eighty-nine percent of French people took vacation, compared with 57 percent of Americans, who often preferred to trade in their days for cash. And how about those fierce riots when President Sarkozy upped the French retirement age to sixty-two?

It’s clear that the little Frenchies are watching. A mini riot broke out not long ago among schoolchildren over a false rumor that Sarkozy wanted to eliminate several school holidays. I wonder, was this due to
joie de vivre
or aversion to
l’école
?

On a smaller scale and with fewer burning cars, in my home we have made major strides in finding the joy in food. In addition to our attempts to revamp our eating rituals on a daily basis, we’ve also introduced the “Saturday Night Spectacular” to the mix. (The girls were in charge of the name.) Saturday is now sacred, and nary a playdate nor crafting lesson will be scheduled after 4:00
P.M.
Or, if we absolutely have to break the rule (some things, like the Latke Fest we are going to this Saturday, cannot be missed), we devotedly protect Sunday afternoon and evening for the SNS.

This is how it works: Sometime during the week we get together and devise a menu with appetizer, vegetable, main course, and dessert. Although Daphne has lobbied to permanently be assigned dessert, each week we’re all given a different focus. This week, Daphne is on appetizer duty, and she has suggested “little hot dogs wrapped up in ham.” I might have to work with her on that. Once we know what we are going to make, we start gathering, sometimes picking up supplies on the way home from school but other times getting it all on Saturday. When the time arrives, we cook everything together—
from scratch
—set the table with the candelabrum and wineglasses for everyone (and, no, the girls aren’t getting the leaded stuff yet—only juice or seltzer water in their goblets), and most often end up lounging and laughing around the table for more than an hour.

I didn’t realize that Oona and Daphne were loving these dinners as much as Mac and I were, until we were forced to miss one and Oona cried her eyes out. She had wanted to make carrot-ginger soup. Who are these kids?

Meanwhile, my concerted efforts to get them to find the value in extended sleep are a work in progress.

This French penchant is related to
la joie de vivre
, yet it is its own animal and thus deserving of some first-class scrutiny. Edith Wharton (the real E.W., not Oona) once described
the French as “a race of artists.” After observing how they pass this reverence for beauty down the line, I now understand why Wharton implicated the entire population. I also now have more perspective, sadly, on my most vivid memory from high school French class, when my teacher, Madame Prideux, stopped in front of each of our desks (more than twenty) with an outstretched hand so that we could admire her rings: “All ze gems are real. I do not wear fake jewelry. Aren’t zay beautiful?” This was an all-girls Catholic school, which makes it a little less weird—but only a little. Even though I barely looked up from drawing on my shoes and thinking Mme. Prideux was a snob, I remember well that they were emeralds. Now, in retrospect, I feel kind of bad. She was just being French and trying to instill some
taste
in us—a motley crew of California teenagers dripping in accessories from Contempo Casuals. As a French mother, she probably couldn’t have helped herself.

Beauty, however, doesn’t have to come from swank jewels for the French to take note. And that’s just it: They like to stop and observe as well as make time to create beauty. I once witnessed a seven-year-old French boy spend at least forty minutes arranging the hors d’oeuvres before the arrival of his grandparents for a weekend visit (a comelier array than anything I’ve ever put together). Halfway through his task, the little guy asked his mother if they could take a quick trip to the park to collect some stones he’d seen the previous day, speculating that they would look nice next to the radish flowers. Seriously, kid? The
request was denied because the park was a good twenty minutes away, but the mom, in turn, sat down and contemplated a number of alternatives to the decorative stones. The boy finally settled on a few dandelions from their front yard to break up the sea of red.

In my house, for Oona and Daphne, it’s all about efficiency. They will race through a coloring book in ten minutes, as though they think that as long as they tag each page with a bit of color it is good to go. I’ve heard the horror stories about French teachers forcing children as young as three to crayon within the lines, using “appropriate” colors. That’s definitely not what I’m after; rather, this particular French lesson is more about taking time. I’m all for coloring faces purple and adding an extra limb here or there to Mickey Mouse and his friends—I’d just like my kids not to be so obsessed with quantity and the speed at which they produce. This goes for handwriting too. Sometimes I hear a little voice saying,
Who cares? Everyone uses computers now anyway
. Yet ever since I began striving to get French, another, stronger voice tells me that it is all related to an urgency that charges so many aspects of my children’s lives. And I love pretty handwriting. So now one of my most familiar mantras is this: “Slow down, Oona.” It’s not exactly George Harrison material, but, hey, I’m busy.

In France, the kids are still taught how to write with fountain pens, to avoid the unsightly
patte de mouche
(ink trails resembling fly footprints) that can be caused when using a ballpoint pen. This ain’t France.

In a very general way, my girls come by it honestly, as many of us Americans tilt toward efficiency over beauty and literally forget to stop and smell/color in the roses. But how to counter this inkling in my French pursuit? I have made Oona work on her handwriting and suggested that Daphne go back and spruce up her coloring, but I’m afraid I simply turned this into another chore for them. I had hoped for them to really feel it—like that imaginary French kid in my mind.

To counter this, the only thing I could think to do was to deliberately seek out—and revel in—beauty. I called it “Sublime Time,” in hopes that the girls would be more interested in something with a smart name (go ahead and scoff, but it has worked wonders in the past). I’d announce something like, “We are going for a walk, and everyone must point out five things they find beautiful and explain why.” Lamentably, early on this also gave birth to another new appellation, “Daphne’s Sublime Time Whine”: “This is boring. Why can’t we go home or to a playground?” Mercifully, as with almost everything we’ve tried, she got used to it. She even got into it. To my delight and, I’ll admit, surprise, there was definitely something new going on with the girls the last time we visited the Metropolitan Museum of Art. It’s not as if Oona and Daphne were opining on the use of shadow in Caravaggio’s late works, but they didn’t run through with blinders on, stopping only momentarily at things that might include a funny cartoon (as in days of yore), asking when we could hit the cafeteria.
We spent a lot of time with the Flemish. Too much? Let’s just say a lot.

This priority has given me cause for some extended thought and investigation. It’s kind of a toughie, and if ever I were granted the ability to magically blend our two cultural approaches on only one portion of this puzzle, I’d use it on education (or discipline—oh, I can’t decide). The truth is, the discipline we can revamp on our own, but as the French and American school systems are so vastly different, I would need the assistance of a genie for any transformation. But that doesn’t mean we can’t learn something from our friends in France.

I find the French approach to education fascinating—and also a bit terrifying. It’s complicated.

Because of this, everything—including Daphne’s kindergarten parent-teacher conference—is put through the French sieve, and nothing goes unquestioned. By the time I managed to bring my jawbone back up to its proper position on my face, the aforementioned conference was almost over. Daphne’s teacher had just finished telling us about how Daph was one of the most dutiful, willing, and obedient students in her class.
Really?

Mac and I were both so surprised that I’m afraid we squandered at least one of our allotted ten meeting minutes in shocked silence, trying to imagine our little combustion
engine of a child sitting quietly at her desk during lessons. And of course I couldn’t help thinking:
How delightfully French
.

The Daphne-behaving-well part was French; the meeting itself was anything but. I’m told that in France, parent-teacher conferences last about an hour and a half—and there are often cocktails involved. Maybe that is the answer to teacher burnout here in the United States. The job might seem less exhausting and thankless with some regular libations. I am only half kidding here, as I once witnessed the teachers’ dining room table at a
collège
(kind of like middle school) in France set for luncheon with multiple bottles of wine—on a typical, nothing-special Thursday, mind you. I read that day’s menu as well and remember thinking that a teaching gig in France might just be the ticket, if only for lunchtime.

Ever since a twelve-year-old Parisian girl beat me in a speed round of listing the country capitals of Europe, I have had a hunch that there is something to be gained from a good look at the way the French school their kids. In my defense, she lives in Europe
and
there’s been a lot of redrawing, additions, and subtractions to the map I studied in high school. Moldova? (Chişinău, dammit!) Then again, this kid was twelve and would have won even if I’d had all the time in the world.

My buddy Paul, an alumnus of French national education himself, commented that the only way to go to a bad school in France is to pay for it. In other words, French public schools are generally excellent. No shock there, perhaps,
as the French Ministry of National Education is among the top five largest employers in the world. Because French education is so centralized and organized, students in all regions of France are taught the exact same curriculum, unless they are being privately educated. For these
étudiants
, school is not fun and games but honest-to-goodness work. Okay—so although I can’t do a whole lot about the U.S. national system of education, I can try to weave in a bit of this French attitude.

When Oona first started school, I worried that the New York City school-district mandate for homework in kindergarten would drain her and squelch any enthusiasm for learning. I was so stuck on the idea that, after a string of post-school meltdowns within the first month, Mac and I began to tour private institutions. We fell in love with the Brooklyn Waldorf School, not too far from our apartment, but soon realized that this was not an option unless we won the lottery. Instead, I decided that we’d ignore the homework altogether. (In hindsight, maybe it was the constant playdates and dance classes that had Oona coming unglued every evening.) So Oona did not do any of the kindergarten homework. Her American mom said that she didn’t have to. For fun (of the masochistic sort), I now like to imagine how that would have gone down in a French school.

Save for their luxurious—and delicious—parent-teacher conferences, French parents don’t spend a whole lot of time in the classroom. They’re not welcome. In fact, if parents want to speak with a teacher, they typically have to make an appointment with the school secretary, which
is often a lengthy process; they also must have a really good reason. When a child is in school in France, the school is in charge. There’s no barrage of emails asking for parent volunteers to come and clean the hamster cage or read during library time. Again, I know this is not a fair comparison and that constant budget cuts have necessitated an even greater classroom presence for us American parents. Still, I find the French outlook on school intriguing and have selectively chosen elements of it to emulate, particularly their habit of making school a top priority in the lives of their children.

For French parents, it is when their kids come home from school that they must step up. First there is the homework—which is
not
unsubstantial. Also, French children are ranked in the classroom, and teachers read their scores aloud on a daily basis. No parent wants their kid to be announced last and used as the example of how not to be (alas, humiliation is a common practice
à l’école
too), so the pressure is on for parents to make sure their little student understands the lessons on a daily basis. This French priority of raising a good student may be crucial to keeping the kids from being completely dejected.

I’ll admit, I’ve become obsessed with French education. Throughout that country, schools convene on Monday, Tuesday, Thursday, and Friday. The hours of operation are usually 8:30
A.M.
to 4:30
P.M.
, give or take fifteen minutes, which explains how they make up for Wednesday (although I’m sure they aren’t looking at it that way). I love this. Oh, how I wish the French hours were one of those
elements I could incorporate. French children don’t expect a whole lot after school, because it’s already pretty late and they have homework to do. As one mom from Dijon said, “We just go home, tend to the schoolwork, have a little dinner, and then Luc goes to bed.” Luc, her son, is eight. My girls seem to think that their day starts over once school lets out at 2:50, and when I’m on pickup duty I usually get hit with a “What are we going to do today, Mom?”

“I know! How about homework, dinner, and bed?”

These days, Oona rarely has a problem getting her homework done, but until I toughened up, I would often let her pound it out over breakfast or even in the car on the way to school.
Désolée
darling. Homework comes before anything else after school. Ever since I’ve stopped allowing the girls to watch television on school days, this hasn’t been too difficult to implement. It’s a beautiful thing when priorities sync up.