So. Some time ago I married a rather lovely French expat man who recently agreed to continue his international adventure on the other side of the world in jolly old England, taking on once again cultures and customs not his own in the spirit of global exploration. He is wonderfully good at assimilating and is practicing with pleasure the very British art of complaining about the weather, listening to Radio 4 and delighting in London's green spaces and Sunday morning walks. He still hasn't proclaimed his allegiance to dear Queenie, isn't yet convinced that the NHS really is free, and prefers a coffee to an Earl Grey but at least he's ordered his My Waitrose card to get said coffee for free from one of our most loved national treasures.
Such daily adherence to my culture comes with the agreement that major holidays be spent bathing in his culture in the busom of his family in the south of France, nestled in foie gras, champagne, nespresso machines and babies. Lots and lots of petit filou-type francophone adorable babies. It's hard, I know, but these are the sacrifices one makes for one's husband.
Now, despite many travel adventures over the last ten years (so old) or so, this was my first Christmas spent away from Chez Shep where, obviously, we do Christmas The Shep Way or, as some people have come to think of it: The Right Way. Other ways of doing Christmas are of course The Wrong Way, The Hoi An Way and the French Way.
The French Way, like an unreasearched visit to Australia, is strangely similar but by no means in any way the same as The Shep Way, thus I spent this festive season floating through a blue and white striped, onion-garlanded twilight zone of Christmas playing 'spot the difference', 'spot the equivalent' and 'don't get upset that they don't understand that it's not done this way'. Whilst practicing the tolerance and open-mindedness typical of my long-and-proud-history-of-colonisation mother nation, I observed and recorded some rather curious and peculiar rituals performed by these dark and swarthy peoples across the Channel or the 'Manche' as they like to incorrectly call it:
1. They put shoes under the tree for Père Noel to fill, but no sign of a stocking. Similar, but weird.
Poor petit filou inherited niece #1, the only one capable of speech, and the only French family member speaking a similar standard of French as moi was very upset when she saw my enormous boots on the left because, even though she is only three, she is intelligent enough to note that I have abnormally large feet, even for an adult, and thus would be receiving an inordinate number of presents that far outnumbered the volume capable of fitting in her own tiny booties. Too bad, petit enfant: Père Nöel favours the outsized and galumphing.
2. Having fairy lights on the Christmas tree just isn't a thing. Everyone looked at me politely when I described it. That was all. I have no picture of the naked tree because what would be the point?
3. All dessert is frozen and in winter landscape form.
Wow! The French are so proud of their natural contours that they immortalise them in cream and chocolate. And then they devour and conquer. Gosh.
4. In France, on Christmas Day, you don't eat until you want to be sick but pass out over a game of Scrabble still cradling a warming glass of Baileys, the only one you will drink all year before waking up with tiles worthy of a triple word score stuck to your face. It's just not good manners, apparently. There was also a sad absence of potatoes.
5. On the 27th December, in France, one sits outside on the terrace in sunglasses without protective clothing to ward off pneumonia. I kid you not. I got a tan on my face.
One of my more profound and serious reflections from this holiday period though only came to me when I counted the number of entirely bizarre and uncontextualised statements I made in the presence of my family-in-law that read more like Berlin speakeasy passwords circa 1934 rather than the conversation starters they were intended to be. Allow me to offer a few examples and please remember that nobody listening had any idea what on earth I was talking about:
"The cat arrives on Friday."
"Where is your sesame?"
"It is not far for her to reach, the floor."
...? Entirely unfathomable. The majority of my functioning conversation was with my three year old petit filou niece in law who, when crouching down in the middle of the town square and squealing 'pee pee!', was communicating on approximately the same level as me. Having said that, she is quite articulate and berated me a number of time for reading her stories wrong. Mais non, Emma! C'est un lionceau!
Lion cub, apparently. Who knew?
Anyway, a week after the grammatically incorrect festival that was Christmas at the in laws, I returned to work for the first time in six months in an 'up and coming' Greater London school. In my first week back I met lots of lovely students and was reminded of the crippling impact of poor literacy and after my beautiful francophone Christmas, dear me, am I beginning to empathise however, poor literacy is not about speaking English or another language well, so in fact, I'm lying, I can't empathise at all - I am super duper literate in English, I just appear to be some form of weird dream manifestation in French, floating around saying random things that are tediously linked to a conversation you vaguely remember having three days ago. Cat? What sesame cat?
Literacy is about communicating and making sense of the world in which you live through some tool of communication be it writing, speaking, sign language, listening, reading - whatever. And in communicating your experience, you create and develop your experience. Imagine if my only experience of the world was sitting mutely at a dinner table with nine other people, unable to ever take part, smiling politely before growing bored and distracted, offering to clear plates because at least that is a way of having purpose but really sitting there feeling worthless because I can't understand, or I can understand but can't contribute and making a meaningful verbal connection with me is so much effort that nobody bothers. This is the worst scenario of my francophone experience but for some children, a lesser version of this is every day in the classroom and if it's every day in the classroom, the likelihood is that they are then opting out of experiences that require a literacy that they do not possess: watching the news, reading a book, writing coursework, filling in important forms, accessing higher education, engaging with politics, expressing complex emotions, visiting museums and galleries, reading about other cultures...
Low literacy really is rubbish. Boo.
So that's about it, really. But if that's all a bit depressing, here's some positive ideas:
1. If you have a child, read with them.
2. If your partner speaks a different language to them, read in both languages!
3. If you teach kids with low literacy, get into Accelerated Reader.
4. If you teach in London, ask me about all the great training that Teach First does!
5. Watch this video: Ed Sheeran reminds us that there are lots of ways to communicate: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=ZXvzzTICvJs
That is all.
No comments:
Post a Comment