Today is January 1st, and the internship is almost halfway through.
The school where I practiced is the same as the school in the film (translated into a high school classroom, but the film is about a junior high school). It is a public school located in a sensitive neighborhood. Intuitive feeling, just like in the movie, there are not a few traditional French people in a class, most of them are blacks and Arabs, and a small number of Southeast Asian or blonde and blue-eyed students dot it.
Except for the second half of the film about the Mali boy Souleymane who lost control and was eventually fired, and the process of meeting his teacher with his parents, I have encountered almost all of the story lines in the film. The difference between the students’ living space and the mainstream culture makes their literacy skills lower than average, and the learning habits that are completely different from those of the Chinese formed since childhood make even Chinese students of the same age look like pediatrics. Math problems have become a fantasy. Coupled with the almost global adolescence pain, school is not an easy place for both students and teachers.
Fortunately, in the face of teaching difficulties, every teacher has somewhat of his own countermeasures.
In general, the way they face it is faire avec (live with it), that is, to face the uncontrollable classroom frankly, and try to teach students something according to the situation of each class, so that students can spend more every hour. Learn something more or less. Even if the next time students come to class, they can only remember one-tenth of what they have learned. If this class allows students to sit quietly and concentrate for twenty minutes to listen to class, take notes or do exercises, it will be considered a victory.
It's just easier said than done. In the face of a group of agitated teenagers whose attention is easily distracted, twenty minutes is also a luxury. Everything can cause the classroom to lose control. In one of the worst classes (perhaps because every time they had a class before me was a physical education class), the teacher I assisted never fulfilled their expectations for a class. The students insulted each other and stood up everywhere. Go, keep raising your hands (even if no one allows them to speak at all) and say something meaningless, but you can't listen to the class quietly. It is common for the teacher to go back to the office and start scolding his mother after finishing the class. During the break, the sofa is full of poor people who are holding coffee and looking into the air a little bit, and the class bell rang and unwilling to get up.
Over time, you will find that, like the protagonist in a movie, shouting with excitement in class is the least effective. Unless the aura is amazing and can overwhelm the students, otherwise it is to let the students watch the jokes and make themselves unable to get off the stage. Wang Dao still looked directly at the troubled student, called out his name aloud, and calmly and solemnly told him to shut up. Emotions or something, let's vent it later.
There was a weekend at the end of November. I went back to my previous school to attend an alumni gathering. I met the teacher from last year and talked about my current situation. I must complain about the vulgar and rude students and low teaching level. Teachers who graduated from higher normal schools said that this was the result of the reform of educational concepts in the past two to three decades, because educators said that they should listen to the voice of children, so children became king of children. As a product of the Chinese elementary education assembly line, I secretly said in my heart that listening to children’s voices is not wrong. I just have to pay attention to the method, especially when facing half-year-old junior high school students. They gradually understand the rules of the game in this world, and even if they have not learned anything, they can judge them objectively and honestly. Don't run into any problems, and immediately answer I don't know. I think it’s correct to communicate with students like Mr. Marin in the film. It’s just that as a teacher, you have to master your emotional involvement and always treat teaching sensibly with a good attitude for students. This is the thing that needs to be controlled the most, and it is also the most difficult.
As for race, who doesn't have a few stereotypes in their minds? The culture of immigrants is sometimes modeled and generalized. As long as the situation is basically true and you can maintain an open mind to treat everyone in your life, it will not cause real problems in micro-social life. The racial problem is a comprehensive problem covering culture, economy, religion, etc. It cannot be solved by electing a black president overnight. Everyone can only find their own answers slowly in their own lives.
Recently, French society is keen to discuss the issue of national identity. Some people lament the low percentage of people who think that the descendants of immigrants are French. When I face those vibrant faces of various colors, I always feel that saying that they are French and that they are not French are equally incomplete. Only true communication and sincere expression can solve the problem. When the students in the movie quarrel about which team is their national team, they are really thinking, and so am I, so there is always something in the world that is different because of this thinking. That's not bad.
In general, this film is very lovely.
PS, I watched this movie during the holiday, it was like preparing for class on Monday.
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