Salhia Brakhlia goes to meet a woman who exercises an essential profession in society. Anaïs Brunet is a history and geography teacher. She confides in the microphone of franceinfo.
“The job of teacher remains a rewarding job even if there are more and more difficulties, I think what you have to accept is to plant seeds that you don’t see growing.” Anaïs Brunet is a history and geography teacher at the Jean Jaurès college in Evreux (Eure). The teacher has been practicing for nine years.
His typical day: eight hours of class in front of students. “And that is without the preparation of the coursesdetails the teacher, it’s without everything that we have to do on the side, because now we have to take the courses online. This is without the correction of the copies. When we go for the weekend or on vacation, we don’t just have free time.”
Anaïs has between 25 and 30 students per class. “It’s too muchshe laments, because it is between 25 and 30 students but it is above all 30 individuals, each with their problems, their social origin.” Anaïs is also sorry for the lack of means, in a college which has between 600 and 700 students. “There is only one computer room for all the colleaguesdenounces the teacher. Knowing that a third of the computers do not work.”
“The taste of effort is complicated”
More than one in ten young people have “reading difficulties” in France, according to a study by the Ministry of National Education, which is based on tests carried out among the 750,000 participants in Defense and Citizenship Day in 2022. “It’s a generation of immediacy, so the taste for effort is complicatedregrets Anaïs Brunet. Drafting an answer is very difficult to make them understand that it’s not extra work, that they need it. If they do not immediately have a sense of the learning that is brought to them, they have no motivation to do so.
“Today authority must be built. A teacher who will arrive thinking he has frontal authority, it no longer works.”
Anaïs Brunet, professor of history and geographyAt franceinfo
“We make a team with the students, we are team captains but the students respect the authority of a teacher when they feel he is benevolent, when they trust him”assures the teacher.
After the assassination of Samuel Paty, this 47-year-old teacher beheaded on October 16, 2020, the teacher claims to have been shocked, paralyzed in front of her television. “After the shock, it’s true that we reflect on our practices, we all wondered if now we were in danger by showing this or that documentrecognizes Anaïs. But I don’t want to censor myself. So you have to open the discussion with the students (…) There is a bond of trust in working with the classes to feel safe (…) They have freedom of expression, even if it means saying shocking things. I prefer that they say what they have in mind and that we can debate and discuss it afterwards, rather than a student who will be quiet, who will think the exact opposite of what I am telling him but who is not going to manifest it.”
“Essentials”, a franceinfo podcast by Salhia Brakhlia, to be found on the franceinfo website, the Radio France application and several other platforms such as Apple podcasts, Podcast Addict, Spotify, or Deezer.