Precerpt from My 20th Language: L4, French - High School French Classes

High School French

My high school French courses were probably like no other. I started out in French 1 at Sanford High School (Maine), where French was pretty ubiquitous and most of the students—heck, all of the other students—in the class had already had eight years of French in elementary school and spoke it at home. The teacher that year was new. He did not know the background of his class because he had moved to Maine from Canada in order to take the job. He was young. He was handsome. He was cocky. And he did not know us!

After we all sat down for the first class, he grinned, looked around, and found a pretty girl in the front seat in one of the rows. Thinking no one would understand, he jokingly asked, “Voulez-vous coucher avec moi?” [Do you want to sleep with me?]—not something acceptable in this day and age but back then would be taken as a joke.) For him, the joke was that he had said something fresh, but immediately the joke was on him.

Our classmate looked him up and down slowly, then answered in French, “Ah, bien, moutsi,” using a untranslatable local expletive that would not be found in a standard dictionary and that parents would wash out the mouths of their kids for using! She added, in French, that he was far from good enough for her.

That literally blew him away. He took two steps backward. His eyes widened, and he asked, in French, “C’est le premier course de français?” [Is this French 1?]

“Oui, monsieur,” [yes, sir] the whole class answered in chorus.

And we were off and running. Our books arrived in December, not September. But it did not matter. There was plenty to do. After all, everyone already spoke French. Everyone except me, that is. And I held on for dear life!

Once we got our books, they were not introductory textbooks. They were grammar review books, assuming native speakers. Again, I held on for dear life, learning the grammar as the others were re-learning it correctly.

That was French 1. And that was the end of my time at Sanford High. The following year I was enrolled at Spaulding High School in Rochester, New Hampshire. (Our little town of Acton, Maine had no high school and so had to beg spaces at schools in surrounding communities.)

That year, Holy Rosary, a K-12 French-speaking school had just closed, and the students from there came flooding into SHS French classes. Like French 1 in Sanford, French 2 was not a typical French 2 course. It was a literature course. We read some very interesting works, beginning with La Chanson de Roland in September, the Le Petit Prince by Antoine de Saint‑Exupéry, the works of Gide (La Symphonie pastorial) and Camus (La Peste and L’Étranger) during the winter, Molière in the spring (and took a field trip to Boston to see an enactment of Tartuffe), and ending with Les Jeux Sont Faits (Sartre) in June. No high school outside of a French-speaking community could match the amount of French learned in such a French 2 course.

French 3 was even better, more challenging and a lot of fun. It was a creative writing course, in French. One of the “texts” we used was Mots d’heures, gousses, rames, a collection of homophonic transformations. After reading, enjoying, and laughing our way through the book, our assignment was to work in small groups and produce our own additions to the book. Not an easy task but a heck of a lot of fun. Because 75% of my school were native speakers of French (mostly second generation where French was the language of the home), our school publications were bilingual, and our French 3 class contributed poetry and essays in French to the school magazine. It was one of the most enjoyable and useful classes I had. And far from a typical French 3 class.

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