School portraits / Wednesday evenings in New York, 2019
Eighteen École Children Passed French. Then the Parents Signed Up.
A bilingual school in Manhattan put eighteen children through a French diploma exam, then offered the same preparation to the adults. The adults had further to go.
One year, eighteen students at The École, a French-American school in Manhattan, from fourth through eighth grade, sat the DELF, the French government's diploma for people who learned French as a foreign language. They all passed, the school reported, "with flying colors."
The next year, 2019, the school did the obvious thing. For the first time, it ran a preparation course for the adult session of the DELF and DALF, once a week on Wednesday evenings, taught by its middle-school French coordinator, for a mix of parents and staff. In addition to the instruction, the school noted, the adults got to bond in a new way: as classmates.
Classmates. Somewhere in Manhattan a parent who has spent years asking "Did you do your homework?" sat down on a Wednesday night next to the person who runs the front office, and was asked to conjugate.
My own French stopped in 1995, at a level I would describe as able to order a croissant and unable to follow up. I tried it on the youngest's babysitter, who is from Lyon. She answered kindly, in English, which is French for no.
The adult exam had to be taken at FIAF, the French Institute Alliance Française, the only approved test center for it in New York. Some of the École's adults sat it in the spring. Others were going to wait for the next sitting, in June. The school wished them all the best of luck, which is what you say to adults. To the children it had said "flying colors."
The school's head, in a weekly letter, explained why this is harder than it looks. French and English are full of false friends: "to cry" does not mean crier, "eventually" does not mean éventuellement. And there is no French word for "feedback." When a French-American school gives parents very positive feedback at conferences, he wrote, "the joke is that we're too American." If it is less effusive, parents worry.
There is no French word for "feedback." I have been giving my family feedback for twenty years, and all along there was a translation problem.
I downloaded an app. It has a green owl. On day three the owl sent me a notification asking whether I had done my homework, in the exact tone I use on the middle one, and the middle one read it over my shoulder and laughed for longer than the lesson took.
I am now on day forty-one. The owl is effusive. My wife says that's the problem: it's too American.
Sources
The public records, school pages and published accounts this story draws on. Where the story imagines a scene or a line of dialogue, that is the column’s telling, not a quotation.
- DELF for Adults at The École theecole.org
- The École Parents Association: Community Spotlight, Tara McAllister theecolepa.org
- Weekly Letter from Jean-Yves: Intercultural Issues theecole.org