Travel Reference
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When a Butterfly Flaps its Wings...
French schoolchildren arrive home every evening with a mountain of homework. For me, it's
no wonder they spend a large part of their adult life on strike: by the time they've grown up
they're a spent force, exhausted by their admittedly top-notch education. Samuel does more
homework in a week than I can remember doing in a whole term, so it's good that while things
are still relatively within my academic capabilities I can help him out a bit.
'Can you help me with my science project, Daddy?' he asked, and I was only too happy to
oblige. We sat down, he got out his books and then he got out his 'homework'.
'What the sweet bloody hell is that?' I screeched, falling off my chair.
'Frog's legs,' he replied with a perfect Gallic shrug. 'You've got to help me dissect them.'
I'm all for parental involvement in a child's homework and more than happy to be encouraged
by the state in this regard, but this is surely a step too far! Not least because it raises the pos-
sibility of a re-working of that old chestnut 'the dog ate my homework.'
'Where's your homework, Samuel?'
'My dad ate it.'
This all felt less like 'Let's get the parents involved' and more like 'Let's wind up the Eng-
lishman'. I distinctly remembered parents' evening and there was no mention of frog's legs;
I think I would have remembered that. Parents' evening is quite a different matter to what I
remember my parents attending in England. There's no one-to-one unless it's needed; this is
more a general overview of school rules and in particular the curriculum for the forthcoming
year, explaining what's expected of the pupils and what's expected of the parents. That's quite
a good thing you might think, letting the parents know exactly where they stand and what will
be covered in the next few months, and in principle it is - but not always.
There were some notable absentees amongst the gathered mums and dads this year, some
parents clearly still recovering from last year's debacle in which Samuel's teacher attempted to
explain to the gathered crowd the 'new method' for teaching long division. These meetings are
supposed to last an hour, but three hours later the place was like a brainstorming session at a
failing dotcom company: people had broken up into groups (some might say factions), there
were huddles by the blackboard and groups in all four corners of the room; men had loosened
their ties, women were telling other women to calm down and nobody, except the incredibly
patient teacher, had any idea how the new system worked.
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