Growing up, I read the entire series of Laura Ingalls Wilder's "Little House" books approximately eleventy billion times. I'm talking major love, here.
Drawn from her real-life adventures, Wilder's mostly gentle descriptions of her 19th century farm life made me dream of being a pioneer girl (minus the diptheria and crop failures, of course).


Her books did not, however, make me dream of going to or being a teacher in a one-room schoolhouse. Her mother taught in one before getting married and Wilder herself went to a few different schools as her family moved around the country. At age 15 she earned a teaching certificate and taught for a few years. So Wilder knew the topic quite well...and what she had to say was not good. (I won't go into detail. Read the books, if you haven't yet.)

But when we put our twin daughters into the local school here in our little corner of France, I went in with an open mind. Optimistic, even. One room, one teacher, three grades and 17 students...it wouldn't be so bad. It might even be good? It's not the 19the century any more. It's not even the 20th century, right?

I ended up spending a lot of time helping at the school. About once a week, I ran the tiny village library so that the students could check out books there. I was always available to accompany the class on outings ( ski week, folk dancing, cross-country racing, etc..) And finally, I ended up teaching English there twice a week for about five months.

This gave me a chance to see how a small school in a tiny French village actually works. And this is an interesting question. The village school is a point of pride to many small communities in this country. Few villages, no matter how minuscule, seem to want to have their children put in vans and driven off to a bigger school, no matter how nearby and well-equipped that school may be. They all want their own school- and that means the old one-room schoolhouse format is still a going concern in France. That's not to say they do it very well, but these schools are still very common. And there is a huge uproar when local councils try to close them down due to lowered enrollments and/or lack of funds. (Here's a recent piece from Le Monde where a teacher reports about the horrible state of a village school in France. I'm not the only one saying this stuff.)

There was sure an uproar around here last spring when the council announced that the La Corbiere school would need to be closed down. That's the school near our house- the one that housed a single class of first and second graders (CP + CE1). The one that I helped out at was the main school in the mayor's office- a single room for the 17 third, fourth and fifth graders (CE2, CM1 + CM2). The threat of the closure of the Corbiere school had the locals all up in arms. There were meetings and protests and all kinds of fuss.

Me? I just stayed out of it. I had no desire to start an argument and become a pariah in this small village of just over 500 people. I have enough trouble fitting in, thanks very much. Despite all my friendly ways and volunteer work at the school, I figured that my village cred could all be undone in an instant if I voiced my true opinion of the beloved one-room village school.
But I'm feeling a tiny bit brave today (and somewhat annoyed- you'll see why a bit further down) so I'm going to share my concerns with you, my faithful blog-friends.

Here's the deal: I lived for nine years in West Africa.

I visited many schools, I went to elementary schools to give presentations and I even taught sunday school for many of those years. Burkinabé schools typically have more than 80 students in one small, hot, dark classroom. Over 100 is not uncommon. But when an adult walks into the classroom, be it the teacher or a guest, you can hear a pin drop. A small pin covered in bubble wrap. Seriously. The kids are quiet and they listen when an adult speaks.
French kids in France?
Not so much.
And I suspect that French kids are no worse than the US ones, Canadians, or kids anywhere else in the developed world. In general, they don't have any kind of automatic respect for the authority of adults- even teachers. Most of them know that if there is any conflict or problem in the classroom, their parents will support them against the teacher. Also, they expect to be entertained all the time, even in a classroom environment. The days where the teacher could expect the students to sit for an hour and work on memorising the major exports of every nation in South America are long over.

A one-room school can work well if the children are polite, respectful, obedient and hard-working. (These kids do still exist, as I mentioned previously, mostly in Africa, as far as I can tell.)
If , however, the students are accustomed to interrupting others, doings as they please and can't concentrate for more than five minutes at a time, the formula is not a successful one. The classrooms are noisy, nobody can work effectively and the overwhelmed teacher ends up spending far to much time on discipline.

I was lucky to be teaching English- the students found it interesting and saw the point of learning it. And I was able to find and/or invent lots of games and creative ways of teaching. We'd sing and dance, I'd bring in props, we'd go outdoors, I'd bring in guests, etc.

But the regular teacher, struggling to teach all the usual subjects to all the different levels of student? Good luck making that constantly fun and fascinating. A lot of learning is just work, and that's all there is to it.

All this in mind, I didn't see the closing of the Corbiere school as a bad thing. On the contrary, I thought that putting the students in the bigger school in a larger town about 4km away would be a good thing. They'd be in dedicated, single-grade classrooms, have access to a gym, more computers, better equipment...and probably a less stressed teacher.

But this was NOT a thing to say to someone in our own little school-proud village. So I kept my mouth shut and ignored the fuss. My kids were leaving the village system anyway, getting ready to go to the junior high (collège) in town.

So, it was only this month that I found out that the Corbiere students were NOT sent to the well-equipped school over in Boege.
Oh no- that would make too much sense.
What happened was the children were all sent to the tiny village classroom where I taught last year- a space that had already seemed crowded with 17 students. This year it holds 26. They range from 1st grade to 4th grade (CP to CM1) and there's one miserable teacher trying to deal with them all. How that poor woman is helping the little ones to get on in a real school (as opposed to maternelle/kindergarten) and teaching them how to read at the same time as teaching all the older ones, I really don't know.

On Saturday afternoon, I saw one of my English students from last year. She's in CM1 this year. "How's school going?" I asked her.
"The teacher yells a lot", she answered. "More than last year."
I'm not saying that's a good way to deal with an unruly classroom, but I can only feel completely sorry for the unfortunate teacher and students forced into this situation...

When I'd take all four of my offspring out and about in Burkina Faso, quite often people would ask "Are they all yours? And are those two twins?"

When I'd answer in the affirmative, I'd generally hear something like "That's great! I didn't know white people had normal families!"


There would be laughter and I'd agree that, in general, white couples have just one or two kids and twins aren't as common.
In fact, I had a lot of fun conversations start that way, back in Africa.



Here in France, my family also draws attention, but for being larger than the norm. People look, and they sometimes ask "Are they all yours?", but they don't ever say "Wow! How normal!"
Even the French government considers three children to be a "large family" and anything over that is officially a "very large family".


This is all build-up to the fact that I went out yesterday 'disguised' as the mother of a very, very large family. And let me tell you, if you imagine that four kids get some attention around here, you should see how people act when they think you have six.

I had rushed off at noon (after a long morning of painting) to pick up the my older kids at their school. They'd ended up asking pals along, so I suddenly had a total of six kids in the car. Rather than try to magically whip up a lunch at home for them, I took them to a mall to eat at Macdonalds. We only do this a few times a year (we big families keep to a budget, you know!), so it was a special treat for everyone. Especially for Val's friend, who had no clue what to order. He stood in front of the menu completely hypnotised. It was only his second visit EVER to a fast food place because his parents detest MickeyD's with a particularly sneering and intense French kind of hatred .
As I fetched (with lots of help, of course) the three trays full of meals, the cashier asked The Question: "Ils sont tous a vous?"
I said "Oui" just to watch her eyes bug out further.


Afterwards, I had some errands, so we wandered the mall: me, eleven year old twins and four more kids, ages 12, 13, 14 and 15. (You can see them all in the photo. Yes, I am such a geek that I made them pose for a picture in the mall parking garage. It's for the blog!)
They were all good, but a bit...loud and giggly.
People looked, of course. And what looks they were- mostly a blend of "Get them OUT of here" and "Gee. Ever heard of BIRTH CONTROL, lady?"

The security guards seemed particularly interested, not in a nice way. And at one point, when the the four older ones got a couple of aisles ahead of me and the twins, I rushed us along to catch up with them.
"What's wrong, mom?" Mal asked.
"I don't want the older kids to get in trouble," I said
"What for?"
"Shopping while teenaged", I sighed
Mal looked at me, kind of puzzled, and I nearly said It's similar to 'driving while black', but I figured she didn't need any more confusion in her life.
"People often think teenagers steal stuff and I don't want any ... misunderstandings." I explained as we turned a corner and found the older kids inspecting the toys and laughing like...a bunch of crazy teenagers.
A security guard came round from the other end just then. He was quite obviously keeping them under surveillance, just in case one of them tried to stuff a Playmobil Pony Ranch down his pants and walk off with it. I gave the guy my best worst glare (which my kids call "The Eyes of Doom") and herded the kids towards the school supplies. We didn't see what we needed, so I asked the woman stocking the aisle for help.
While she didn't have the drawing paper we needed, she did have a question for me : "Are they all yours?"


After the cashier asked me that same question, I'd had about enough and was ready to go home.

"Are they all yours?" seems to be inevitable and international. It's often kindly meant, but can be wearing. There are even websites where parents of large families have collected the many possible (and often funny) answers to this question. So, I guess I'm not the only one to get a tad burned-out on the Q and A.

It was fun, though.

Have you smacked a mosquito today?

It’s World Malaria Day and as we STILL don’t have a vaccine, I guess us non-scientists can contribute to the fight by whacking a few of the disgusting little wretches.

Don’t get me wrong- I am really glad that this deadly parasitic disease is getting more attention. Half a billion people catch it every year. It kills a child (most likely an African child) every 30 seconds. Considering the fact that there’s a whole week devoted to Homeopathy Awareness (?), I guess we can give malaria at least one day. It has put me in the hospital three times and I am a relatively wealthy, lucky and educated person. Here in Burkina, it’s responsible for thousands of deaths every year and many lost days of work and school for those that survive it.

We are being told that a malaria vaccine will probably be ready by 2010. The good scientists at the Malaria Vaccine Initiative seem to be working hard on it. But they don’t have the kind of resources that, for example, Pfizer poured into making those little blue Viagra pills that have been on the market for 10 years now and that last year alone made them 1.7 billion dollars.
And given the way the world works, I think everybody knows that saving the lives of millions third-world people will never garner the same huge cash profits as perking up the wilting manly-bits of the wealthy.

Don't call me bitter- just call me frustrated. Malaria deaths are preventable tragedies.
And until we can make sure that fewer children die, efforts here at family planning and improving quality of life are severely hampered. It's hard to tell a couple out in an isolated village, far from decent medical care, that they should limit their family size. These people know from hard experience that deadly diseases strike hardest at small children.
With an effective and safe malaria vaccine available to everyone on the world, that would mean one less killer on the loose. And that's one less element contributing to poverty and hopelessness.



Coming up this weekend on this very blog : The Pagne Primer: Everything You Ever Wanted to Know About West-African Wrap-skirts, But Were Afraid to Ask.