ado

November 2008

Help! I need advice. Last week in English we were doing irregular verbs and my teacher taught the class to pronounce “sew” as “sue” .

One of the dilemmas of being English in French school is listening to the English teacher mutilate your language!

I bite my tongue when she says “repeat, please” and “finish, please” even though these are transitive verbs and you need to say repeat that or finish this.

And some mistakes are ones that English people make too, like confusing can I? and may I?
At least these won’t stop my French classmates being understood in our future anglophone world. Sue and sew, however, have completely different meanings!

But this is my teacher we are talking about. She is weird, fun, like a kid at times. When the girls disagree with the boys in class and they are right, she sighs and says “not surprising!” I like her.
So, I can’t say anything in front of the class and humiliate her. I can’t say anything after class - she’d still be humiliated. But if she finds out later that she was saying it wrong and I’d said nothing, she might be hurt. If I tell my classmates it’s wrong they won’t respect her. If I don’t, they’ll learn something that’s wrong. What do I do?

We also elected the délégués de classe (class representatives) last week. I voted for a girl I had quite liked - despite her showing signs of belonging to the clones (more next month). But when she lost, she sneered at the “ridiculousness” of a class that could vote for “that” (the winner). Even after revealing her true colours, she still couldn’t understand why she had not, as she expected, been elected.