I think of a lot of clips, think of this time last summer, in Besançon, in a class very, very similar to the movie. At that time, I didn't expect to be able to speak out in daily life. Looking back now, there are so many distinct fragments. The main point of this film has already been stated in the teacher's class: Do you think your life is ordinary and it is not worth narrating?
When I first arrived in France, in the language school, there were five students from Islamic countries, six students from East Asian countries, and five or six students from European Catholic countries.
There is a Syrian man who wears glasses and shaves very short hair. He speaks a little dazedly. He learns very slowly, always can't learn, and often doesn't come to class. The teacher was younger than him, and always asked him why he didn't come like a real class teacher, and he made up all kinds of excuses like a real middle school student. It is said that he has been in the first class for two months, and he still can't get up at the end of the month. I don't know why he refuses to devote his energy to studying. The tuition fee is at least 700 Euro a month. He doesn't seem to care.
Once I met him and his wife at the entrance of the supermarket, pushing a stroller, and buying a lot of things. They looked happy and peaceful, but he said that his wife had not processed the visa and might have to return to China at any time.
During the class, the class was divided into two sides. East Asian students listened quietly, and the teacher did not ask questions. Arab students and European students rushed to talk to the teacher.
There was a Chinese boy who was in class together. He was very uncomfortable with the atmosphere in the class. The teacher talked to everyone and responded to whoever asked questions. The Chinese boy became increasingly confused. He didn't know if the teacher was teaching or who he was chatting with. He was upset and lost his temper secretly in class.
A Libyan boy was dark and thin, with deep sunken eyes and good-looking eyes. He always talked to the teacher in class. The Chinese boy is very annoying to him. He always raises his hand in class and asks the teacher to shut him up. He doesn't understand how the teacher likes such a student.
Once in the class we discussed whether men and women are equal. A handsome Serbian student of theology has only one sentence: men and women are equal, because the Bible says so.
Libyan boys said that men and women are of course not equal. As long as men earn enough, women don’t have to work. What does she want to work for? She can go out for walks, go shopping, and chat with other women at home. Women shouldn’t work.
The Chinese boy and I said that since socialism, Chinese women have all worked out, and now their grades and careers are similar to those of men, and discrimination against women is not serious, and men and women are basically equal.
We talked about a lot of self-righteous "views", and then it was the Polish girl's turn. She said that in my opinion, men and women are equal because they are no different.
That was the first time I saw my deep-rooted educational tradition so clearly. We talked too much about external phenomena, hoping to have profound opinions, but in fact these are not opinions.
The Polish girl is only seventeen years old, with blond hair and blue eyes, wearing hot clothes, and likes to smoke after class. She is good at French, so she laughs in class, passes cheat sheets, and teaches other people to speak swear words in French.
Chinese boys told me more than once that he felt that Europeans still discriminated against Chinese. He felt that they were polite on the surface and discriminatory in their bones, because he found Polish girls looking at him with mocking eyes on more than one occasion. I said I didn't think it, maybe because it was all girls.
Later, I gradually got acquainted with the girl and chatted about the family. Only then did I realize that she is a descendant of one of the seven orthodox nobles in Poland. Dinner. But she didn't like that. She moved out to school by herself, hoping to marry a romantic man like that in an Indian Bollywood movie in the future.
There are still many memories, and they are all shots when I think of them.
Nowadays, I don't like watching movies that use some constructed plots to reflect a profound social problem. Such plots are the vassal of the problem. I don't care whether it is deep or not. People are people. People will live cautiously, uncertainly, awkwardly, try their best to be gentle, and slide across the surface of real conflict. And this kind of imperfection is life.
It's not just tears and head-on exchanges that are values struggles. At one dinner table at a time, I listened to a peer who had already become a middle school teacher talking about skipping classes in the postgraduate entrance examination class while talking about how difficult it is to manage the current students and how important it is to control the situation. Only then did I realize that, It is so easy for people to shuttle, contradict, and weigh between several values and behavior patterns, and this superficial mediocrity already contains a lot of the heaviness of life.
Marin really tried to be a good teacher.
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