02.22.12.

I have learned many lessons across my last (and first!) five months as a classroom teacher. And if I continue in this field, I will surely learn countless more. But already, I can start to see which ones are essential for my classes to function properly at the French elementary schools where I teach. And right behind making a lesson plan is the need to institute time limits.

In many respects, the need for time limits is common to all young children. They need structure (temporal or otherwise) because they generally have not yet developed the ability to adapt their behavior and restrict their actions according to their circumstances. In other words, and put more positively, children are often so absorbed in what they are doing that they wouldn’t think to worry about adult concerns like productivity and timeliness. In my case, the need to institute time limits with my students, aged seven to 11, is due in part to this, and in part to the fact that French students write exquisitely. They are a flock of petite calligraphers. And these modern-day Matisses take their sweet time.

You don’t know how long it can take to write «Monday, 9 January 2012» until you have seen a French elementary school student at work. The curves, the dips, and the swoops of their vowels interlace with the bold strikes of their consonants, and the result is alphabetic harmony—ten minutes later.

I wonder at this amazingly sedate pace when I make my rounds in the classroom to check up on my students’ progress. For me, such time consumption constitutes an unacceptable inefficiency. The act of writing the date is only preliminary to the activity that will follow, and it is imperative that we not get bogged down in the details! We have vocabulary and linguistic structures to learn!

What most disarms me in this situation is that my students do not dawdle out of laziness. (Apart from a few, in any case.) Rather, it is because they are a band of perfectionists. Perhaps one or two are this way by nature, but what we are dealing with here is in fact a greater phenomenon: it is institutionalized perfectionism imposed from above, a heightened attention to handwriting ingrained in students by their teachers. Pupils are taught and then required to write in proper cursive, at all times, and if they don’t… well, I’ve seen the resulting torn remnants when they don’t. Teacher isn’t happy.

Which leads me to ask: Why must they write so perfectly? I remember learning to write cursive in about the third grade. We learned to loop our l’s and link our letters, and our cursive writing beautified that month’s homework by a factor of three. But after we finished our cursive unit, most students reverted to their former script, and we went on with our lives. This is the American approach to handwriting. Writing is a tool of communication and little more, and the focus is not on the quality of one’s penmanship. That is, a «q» that is discernible as a «q» is by definition a good «q.» Ours is a pragmatic process with pragmatic goals. Today, above all, when people tend to type or tap more than write or scrawl.

Why, then, must they all write like Cai Xiang? The simple answer is that Teacher says so. But beyond this looms the colossal system of French values, stark and terrible. Producing beautiful handwriting has become an end in itself because if one is to do something, one ought to take the time and make the effort to do it well, comme il le faut. Otherwise, it is better to do nothing at all. This applies at school, at work, and in DIY. It is a matter of honor.

And the result is incredible. There are some nine-year-olds I teach who write like Victorian noblewomen. If they continue down this road, they could go on to illuminate manuscripts at the monastery of their choice.

And so it is that when I ask my students to do a written activity, I patrol the classroom to verify comprehension and accuracy, while the French teacher patrols to verify the quality of students’ handwriting. If it is unacceptable, students are made to erase and start again (if the teacher is a softie), or else the paper is taken from the pupil’s tiny hands and shredded before their ingenuous eyes (à la Martinet). Is such a threat of impending doom, I ask you, conducive to a healthy learning environment?

It is not that I wish to dismiss completely the significance of proper writing. I am proud that my own handwriting has always been legible and pleasing on the eyes. (I know this is true because in third grade I placed third in a cursive contest, and because my friend Cam always tells me I write like a girl.) I appreciate and understand the importance of having good handwriting. Its like having dirt-free, well-trimmed fingernails: it might not earn you a promotion at work, but it will probably impress your girlfriend’s mother.

But I tend to find all of this a bit excessive: both the supreme importance placed on handwriting, and the corrective polices employed when students flub a few letters. I consider this energy and focus to be misplaced, above all during my English lessons, when my priority is not pupils’ handwriting so much as their correct use (or simply any use) of subjects and verbs, of capital letters and periods. When the last of my students can construct a properly punctuated complete sentence, maybe then I’ll begin ripping papers with uncrossed t’s and undotted i’s. Until then, I’ll leave the shredding of worksheets and destruction of prepubescent souls to my heartless French colleagues.◊