Forget Disney World – your kids will ask for trip to Tour Eiffel
Last
week, just in time for kindergarten registration, the English School Board of Montreal launched a French-only website, NousSommesBilingues.ca, addressing the worry some parents may have that entrusting their children to an English school may be to doom them to a lifetime of erreurs de genre and an accent that could disqualify them from the civil service and public office — akin to investing in a one-way ticket to Toronto, effective 12 years hence.
CTV Montreal ran a poll asking whether “Englishspeaking Quebecers have a responsibility to enrol their children in the English school system.” Of 1,205 respondents, 79 per cent said yes, so clearly there is is a writer and translator who lives in the borough of Plateau-MontRoyal. a sense of community responsibility. French school boards have yet to launch a website designed to ease the guilt of parents who have chosen a French education for their English-eligible children, let alone one that will prepare them for what to expect of their English-eligible children once they are intentionally enrolled in a French school.
Personally, I have two English-eligible children at- tending French elementary schools, one of whom will be transferring next year to an English high school. Throughout their elementary school years, I have noticed a few things about them and French schools, in terms of orientation and attitude, and I’d like to share some of my observations with Gazette readers. For example:
Don’t be alarmed when your children preface every sentence with “Me, I ...” and confuse “J” with “G.” And at times, prepare for your children to accuse you of being “injust.”
The better your children become at speaking French, the more intolerant they will become of your own bad accent. “Brou-ill-on, Mommy, brou-ill-on.”
Your children will call their teachers by their first names. The English as a second language teacher will be the only one to insist on an honorific, but even that will be in combination with a first name, as in Miss Marie-Pier, which will strike you as vaguely Southern.
Your children will use the word “lover” — one translation of amoureux — to designate their teacher’s boyfriend, as in: “The music teacher’s lover played the piano for the concert today.” They will be very disappointed in you when you snigger at this. They will find you provincial.
The school talent show will always feature at least one perfor mance to an English-language song with sexually explicit lyrics that have escaped the well-meaning but unilingual censors. Always. (Sadly, this may be the only formal sex education your children receive. In the current curriculum, French or English, sex education is a multidisciplinary, spontaneous affair, where “all adults who work with children and adolescents are to some extent responsible for sex education,” but no one person — or course — in particular.)
Even if you speak French yourself, you may have to brush up on the New Grammar and the New Spelling if you want to help your children with their homework. Not that your children will want you to help them with their homework. Maybe be- cause of your bad accent, or your Old Grammar and your Old Spelling, but they will prefer professional help. “Why can’t I have a tutor? Everyone has a tutor.” When you run this by other parents, you will find that this is indeed true, that it is generally believed in the French system that children should have a tutor as of Grade 4 if they want to have any hope of getting into a good high school.
Instead of asking to go to Disney World, your child will ask to be taken to the Tour Eiffel. Consider this a perk. And if you do make it to France, don’t forget to marvel at how well your children speak the language. They will sometimes take their own skills for granted. But you, and your bad accent, will know better.