Sharing knowledge of the world

In my (very brief) career as a school teacher one of my tasks was to attempt to teach French to the girls in Year 5 (O level year in those days). It was pretty hopeless – they seemed to have acquired less than no knowledge of the language in the preceding 4 years, motivation was lacking, & my plan to try a crash course starting from scratch was turned down.

So I had to plough on with Whitmarsh Book 5, the very same textbook from which I had been taught. I think it must have been his Complete French Course, dating back to the 1930s, which was pretty much the standard text for all English Grammar Schools in the 1950s. To be the author of a standard text was the ambition of every school teacher in those days – it was the only way to get anything like rich in your chosen profession, & could be very lucrative indeed.

But I was using it to teach Caribbean girls, of varied ethnicities & religions, in the second half of the 1960s.

As I remember it the very first passage for translation from the French described a lane in winter – snow, icicles, hedgerows, robins …

If ever I needed a vivid lesson to demonstrate how reading, comprehension & translation involve much more than a knowledge of grammar & a dictionary, then I had it right there. How do you even start with girls who have never experienced snow, for whom the word robin does not conjure up myriad associations, & Please Miss – What is a hawthorn?

Links
frenchteacher: Whitmarsh
BBC Radio 4 Analysis: The school of hard facts
Core Knowledge®
BBC4: Top of the Form Story