I was mean-girled the other night.
Now, as most of you know, I've been studying French for the past year and a half. I love the country, and love the language and am determined to become fluent by 50. However, this aim is being seriously messed with by my teacher.
She and I have differing views on encouraging students to learn: I believe in the carrot method {praise, encouragement...} while she believes in the stick {a bloody big stick}.
Every now and again she'll pick on someone, just for the fun of it. She'll deride their pronunciation, or their inability to think of a third person pronoun... Anything really. This week it was my turn.
We have to do dictation, where our teacher speaks in French and we write it down. This is hard. Really hard. Usually they're not only sentences we're not familiar with - but words too. Whole new, unfamilar words. Try doing that in English let alone French... This week we had six people in the class, and six sentences. The last two were tough - the final one, impossible. Guess which one I had to write on the whiteboard...
So, there I am, writing word by word. And with every word my teacher's snickering, 'Hoo, hoo, ha, ha"... I'm incredulous - seriously, is this happening? Next word: actual laughter, and encouragement for the class to join in - which, as is typical in a bullying environment, there are a few nervous titters {of the "thank god that's not me" variety.}. I finally get my long, complex sentence up and she comes up. And tells a story. A story of how I remind her of a school student she once had. A student who had many ideas, but, oh, she wrote a story and the teacher said "Is this in French? What language is this?" Because oh, silly child, it was all written phonetically! Um, if you don't know how to spell a word don't you write it phonetically? Isn't that precisely how our children learn?
Then she proceeded to tear every word apart, asked me what the tense was, who the subject was - asked me why I'd written 'e' when she'd so clearly said 'e'. {I kid you not, I still haven't been able to differentiate between those sounds...}
At the time I just fumed silently, but days later I'm still furious. Next week I'll be refusing to write on the board and I'll tell her why. I'm in the class to learn, not to be derided.
I will keep going as I do want to learn the language - fingers and toes crossed that she doesn't teach next year's level. If so, well, I might have to look elsewhere.
Mean-girling sucks at any age.
I've written before about the power of community with blogging - it's one of the things that makes my heart sing. I've 'met' so many people through blogs who are kindred spirits. 
