188. La dictée

I had given up on home schooling. 

The girls were now enrolled in school. My eldest daughter came home on the very first day announcing she had to prepare for la dictée. 

I could cope with that. 

To prepare for la dictée we had to revise verb endings of the second group. I could definitely cope with that. The verbs were cut and pasted in her book. I made zero comments about how pedagogically the cut and paste was probably not the best choice and went through it with my daughter. Old habits die hard and off she went onto the trampoline, pigtails bobbing up and down.

'Boing ... Je finis ... boing ... is ...'

'Boing ... Tu finis ... boing ... is ...'

'Boing ... Il finit ... boing ... it ...'

That pleased me. She was still using the individually designed learning programme developed at home. I was still on top of this.

She was ready for the rigorous exercise of la dictée; she would tackle it with confidence in spite of her verging-on-hippy upbringing. 

'How did it go?' I asked anxiously when she came home. 

'I remembered it all.' 

There. I knew it. Still it was wise to wait to see the result. 

By the end of the week the graded paper came. My daughter had made one very silly mistake. 

'That's a pity!' I said to her. 'Le panorama les éblouit! That was just a regular ir verb! '

'Well the teacher wrote that bit on the board and said it was an exception.'

This was utterly puzzling to me the champion of home-schooling!

'That does not make sense. Never mind. We'll wait for the test paper.'

But she got annoyed and repeated, stamping her feet which made me cross.  

'She just wrote on the board and said that it was an exception and she said we had to make sure we wrote it like it was on the board.'

'All right! Never mind!'

I thought one or the other - my daughter or the teacher - were losing it. As long as I wasn't everything would be ok. I hoped it was my daughter. Kids were like that after all, lots of imagination.

I waited patiently for the paper and when it came home there was, pasted in her book, the text used for la dictée. And HORROR of all HORRORS le panorama les éblouit was there staring at me from the page with no 't' at the end, just an 'i'. What was happening here? I was sending my daughter to a school and she was learning to spell incorrectly! My whole world was coming down on top of me with a huge tumble and crash. In my head it sounded like an earthquake. I went outside to check. No earthquake.

All evening all I could talk about was this. 'Can you imagine?' I was saying to my husband. He could not! He could not see why I was making such a big fuss about one single tiny letter. But he could probably see that he was probably not getting his money's worth with this bunch. 

'You can't see the problem but I can.' I said. 'Tomorrow I'm going to that school to give them a piece of my mind.'

The following morning as the kids were running off towards the play area, I noticed Monsieur le Directeur was there, just hanging around. I stormed off past the gates into the playground, shouting:

'Monsieur le Directeur! Excusez-moi!'

The man was rather young and I thought he was trying to look cool dressed in pale linen and wearing sunglasses. He was all smiles. 

'Bonjour Monsieur le Directeur, et excusez-moi mais ... le panorama les éblouit ... How do you spell éblouit?'

He looked at me, a little bewildered, and tilted his head to one side and said with no hesitation whatsoever:

'i'!' 

Horror of Horrors! This must be school policy! Was he the instigator of the exception? What on earth was I going to do now? As in a movie, an imaginary camera moved backwards away from us to show Monsieur le Directeur talking to an irate mother under a palm tree in a deserted playground. I gave him the look I gave to my kids when they gave me a shockingly wrong answer.

'Non! Non! Bien sûr, c'est 'it'! Oui, c'est ça! It must be the sun!' 

And he laughed as if he had made a good joke. But I was not amused. I wanted an explanation, a big placard on the school gates or maybe even a whole page in the local newspaper with 'Le panorama les éblouit' in big huge letter with the ending underlined.

I drove home like a maniac and rushed to my desk and started writing this incident down. This became a list. Eventually and rather quickly we took the kids out of that school. (But no more homeschooling!)

Looking back today I am wondering if this is not a sign that I might just be a total tiger-mum, helicopter-mum, control-freak ... You name it! (But be kind please 😉)