And they don’t hide it. The Press reported yesterday the remarks of the vice-president of the Quebec Association of French Teachers (AQPF), who can no longer teach the rules of grammar, including the agreement of the past participle and the “cursed” exceptions . The word “cursed” comes from your columnist.
In her exasperation, Alexandra Pharand cries out for help. In high school, a student spends 80 hours learning past participles. It’s a crazy amount of time spent on past participle exceptions, she says.
Students complain, she said. She tries to console them by apologizing, she says, teaching them rules that are 400 years old and out of touch with reality (sic).
Madame Pharand seems ready to drop the dictations as well. “Writing for dictation is not writing to be read. It’s writing to be corrected by your teacher. It doesn’t make a lot of sense for a student,” says the vice-president of the AQPF.
- Listen to the column of Denise Bombardier, columnist at the Journal de Montréal & Journal de Québec at the microphone of Richard Martineau on QUB-radio :
National failure
The frankness of this French teacher is an asset to complete the sad picture of the teaching of French, a national failure in Quebec. It’s the same everywhere, the relativists will say. Maybe. But we, French-speakers of Quebec, are in demographic decline. We can only count on the contribution of immigration to offset this decline.
And who is going to guarantee that our current laws on language and secularism will not be rejected by the courts, all the way to the Supreme Court?
Who is also going to guarantee us that without the constraint of these laws, new immigrants will send their children to French schools?
We can understand the discouragement of French teachers, those unloved by the education system. But in tackling grammar rules and that old practice of dictation, teachers should also challenge math – algebra, or geometry – a headache for many students except mathematician.
- Don’t miss Denise Bombardier’s column, columnist for the Journal de Montréal & Journal de Québec at the microphone of Richard Martineau via QUB-radio :
Effort
Teaching is not only an art, a science, but a high-flying sport. Without dictating, how can you learn to write? Without the obligation to read works with minimal literary qualities which require a particular effort, no transmission of intellectual knowledge will be possible.
Everything has been tried. The sound writing was a disaster. We took away the practice of dictation and memory. This is the unedifying picture of today’s education. In addition, the responsibility for raising the children has been placed on the shoulders of the teachers, a task that too many parents do not assume. However, the school cannot be the compensatory institution for all the needs of young people.
The situation must be intolerable for French teachers in primary and secondary schools to question the constraints of the French language and take up the old refrain of outdated grammar rules.
Learning a language requires effort and the mastery of one’s own genius. English is as difficult to learn as French. And what about Japanese, Chinese or Classical Arabic? Few Quebec children will become writers or linguists. But it is essential to transmit to children the love of their language. By not discouraging them by talking about grammatical pitfalls and exceptions to the rule.