Sharon Harrigan

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Are American Teachers Too Nice?

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My fifth-grade daughter Ella and I shook hands with her pediatrician, then he launched his check-up questions, starting with “How’s school?”

“The teachers are too nice,” Ella said.

He repressed a grin that struggled to creep up. “That’s not usually the complaint I get. Kids say their teachers aren’t nice enough.”

 Ella shrugged.

“Maybe you mean they don’t keep order in the classroom, they let kids act however they want.”

“No,” Ella said. “I mean they keep saying Good Job! even when somebody hasn’t done a good job.”

The doctor looked at me to see whether he was missing the sarcasm in Ella’s deadpan delivery.

I explained that Ella wasn’t reacting to her teachers specifically, but to the American way of praising students.“We just got back from France. Teachers are much stricter there. That’s what she’s used to.”

When Ella first started school in Paris, she was soft, overfed on an American diet of unearned praise. So it was a shock, when she saw that every piece of homework in France is graded on a scale of 20, and nobody—ever—gets a 20. “Only God gets 20,” I’ve heard people say. It is even possible to get a negative grade, since a point is taken off for every spelling error, and it’s not hard to have more than 20 errors in even one French sentence. I heard that children sometimes cried (if not in her class, at least in her school) when their test results came back. Those who didn’t cry in class sometimes did so at bedtime. If you didn’t have a thick skin, you could get beaten down.

Ella didn’t cry. Instead, she worked harder than she ever had in her short school life. The threat of a bad grade, either on paper or (worse) announced to the whole class after an oral exam, motivated her to do her best. To deserve the rare praise when it came. She doesn’t have a fragile ego. If she did, I bet the title of this blog post would be, “French Teachers Are Too Strict.” Without a question mark.

Everyone knows, after Pamela Druckerman’s book, Bringing Up Bebe (called French Children Don’t Throw Food in Britain) that stricter parenting means better behaved kids. I saw Druckerman speak in Paris, where she lives, and she won my heart. I dare you to find anything she says that isn’t common sense. But before I met her, when I’d only read how her critics summarized and sensationalized her work, I was ready to hate her. I don’t think I’m alone in that misperception because a woman in the audience at her talk said, “Isn’t your book just like Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother? You just want to make all us other mothers, whose children aren’t perfect, look bad?”

Druckerman replied that the Tiger Mother book and hers couldn’t be more different. Tiger mothers are ultra hands-on, spend much more time than the average Anglo or American mother on their kids, drilling them and supervising their violin practice. French mothers are ultra hands-off, teaching their children at a young age that they need to be self-sufficient. “Sois sage, comme une image,” or “Be still as a picture,” is their motto. Sage, though, means much more than still. It means wise, in the sense of smart enough to know you should be well-behaved, savvy enough that you don’t have to be told that it’s for your own good.

When Ella’s pediatrician finished checking her eyes and ears and grilling her about what she eats for breakfast, he pronounced her healthy, despite excessive levels of teacher niceness in her system. I told him that I’d try to even out the balance by being extra, extra strict at home. Now he let himself smile, and even laugh.

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Belly Up!

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And now for a break in our regular Paris programming for a word on women’s vanity. Or, more specifically, my own.

I’ve become obsessed with my belly. I measure it, I squeeze it, I crunch it. This is the definition of navel-gazing, isn’t it? Could I become one of those narcissistic people we all love to hate?

Maybe my monomania is caused by a spate of my friends posing in bikinis on Facebook. Maybe I’m worried about getting old. You would be, too, if you spent as much time as I do, lately, writing about death.

I hate diets. Only once in my life have I lost weight, and that was by accident. When people asked me my trick, I said, “It’s the my-divorce-is-so-stressful my-stomach-is-filled-with-acid-so-I-can’t-possibly-eat-a-thing diet. I recommend you avoid it at all costs.” My boss worried and asked, “Are we literally working you to the bone?” A friend of mine went through a similar involuntary weight drop when her daughter had a health scare. I gained all my weight back, as many women do, during pregnancy.

The one diet I remember going on was the cabbage soup diet. Years ago, all the female editors in my department went on it at the same time. Some of them lost fifteen pounds in two weeks and vowed to repeat the experience every year. I became violently ill the second day and vowed to never go on a diet again. And I haven’t. Until now.

When my aunt told me I don’t need a diet, I lied and said I’m concerned only about my health. When my husband told me he thinks my belly is cute, I dismissed him with a wave of the hand. Then he reminded me that when my belly flattens, so will my chest, and I had to admit he was right.  Some women, I realize, don’t have to choose either no curves or all curves, but I do. Genetics, I guess.

I think I have a solution. I’ll put on my bikini and photograph myself head to ribs now. In a few months, with my belly (and also, I fear, my chest) gone, I’ll snap the other half of the picture, ribs to toes. One neat splice and voila! I’ll post my top and bottom together, and then . . . what? Why would I want to do that?

Or maybe I’ll just have a sandwich. All this talk about slicing and dicing is making me hungry.

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Things I Learned from France (or Didn’t)

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I’ve been back in the U.S. for a few weeks. Does the “Paris effect” last? My friend K., who also just returned, said she felt like the year disappeared, as if it were “all a (very pleasant) dream.”

I told myself, though, that what I had going on with Paris wasn’t just a fling. This was a long-term relationship, even if it turned long-distance. I had experienced (multiple!) epiphanies whose transformative effects would not just disappear like cigarette smoke.

Right? Time for a reality check.

Grooming: Before I left the house in Paris, even if it was just to buy the morning baguette or walk a block to the gym, I put on clean, fitted, nonathletic clothes and shoes, brushed my hair, applied make-up, and sprayed perfume. Every time I walked down the stairs, I glossed and rouged my lips. I wouldn’t have thought of showing my face even to strangers without at least this minimal preparation, no more than I would have stepped out naked.

But here? I tried. When I lived in New York City, I had high standards, too, but there’s something about getting in a car that makes me feel invisible.

I started to slip in California, visiting my in-laws. They live in a beach town, and we all piled into the car in our swimsuits then realized on the way back we needed coffee beans. So we sat at Peet’s in our cover-ups, barely covered up. Not that we were the only ones. Then, the other day my son wanted to make eggs for breakfast and we didn’t have any. I was in the middle of my Pilates work-out, but I said, “Sure, I’ll just zip to CVS” in my yoga pants and sneakers. I don’t put on make-up to meet my daughter’s bus. Maybe you’ll have more sympathy for me if I tell you it arrives at 7:09 in the morning? Who’s going to see me, anyway? One of the other moms comes in the overalls she gardens in. Once she arrived in pajamas.

Food: Cheese comes after dinner, not before. Nothing is more rich, delicious, and decadent than a pungent, almost liquified Camembert, so it makes sense to treat it as dessert. This new (for me) concept I have embraced. No snacks between meals, except for the kids’ after-school gouter: I’m down with that, too.  Meals should be eaten slowly, at a table, like a sacred ritual. Mostly I do that. Except yesterday, when I drove my son to college, we were running so late we stopped at the supermarket to buy sandwiches to eat in the car. (Everything about that last sentence shows my standards have plummeted, I know.) Maybe you can blame my son: I was also with him when I bought a coffee to go. (Why do I love coffee to go so much? Is it pretentious to say it feels Proustian to me?)  And then I invited my friend H. for dinner at the scandalously early hour of 6, asking her not to tell anybody. (But now everybody knows.)

Manners: I was completely charmed by the way people address each other as “Madame” or “Monsieur” in France. I vowed I would translate this custom in Virginia, where it’s just Southern enough to use “Ma’am” and “Sir.” But I can’t do it. “Ma’am” somehow sounds too matronly and The Help-ish. “Sir” makes me feel like I’m in the Army.

I try to be more polite to shopkeepers here, as I was in Paris, always greeting them when I enter or leave and bantering a little. This custom occasionally means that a five-minute transaction takes twenty, as when my butcher gave me a manifesto about liver and the cashier at J.C. Penney took my comment about flip-flops as an invitation to tell me about visiting her cousin in rehab while her flip-flops pinched her toes. But at least, in the U.S. when I nod to these strangers, I really do understand what they’re talking about.

What’s my score? Depends how many points I get for The Cheese Lesson. I think that trumps everything.

No? Then maybe I still need more experience in Paris. Is it time to go back yet?

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Push Ups

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With one week left in Paris, you’d think I would have run out of time to have transformative or embarrassing experiences. I managed to have both, thanks to this bra.

My daughter was at a sleepaway camp for six days. My older son was at camp, too, working as a counselor. My husband James and I were alone in Paris for the first time since our honeymoon eleven years ago. It was the last night of what my friend D jokingly called our “second honeymoon” when I called James at his office and asked if he wanted to meet me at Etam to pick out lingerie. He leapt at the chance.

James had been nudging me since we arrived in Paris a year ago buy new underwear, bras, and nighties. The entire city, with its beautiful window displays of nearly naked women and gigantic ads in the metro of scantily clad babes, had been prodding me, it sometimes seemed. I’m frugal and modest. I resisted. Until now.

James seemed to enjoy rifling through the silky fabrics. He chose a super-short nightgown and two bras. One, I realized only after I tried it on, was a push-up. It pushed way up. It pushed out, too. It had a mind of its own.

At dinner James said, “I had no idea how much difference a bra could make.” He seemed both impressed and disillusioned. All the seemingly well-endowed women on the streets of Paris might just be the beneficiaries of this marvelous technology, he mused. (But now, so was I.)

Some things in life we have to be born with. Others we can acquire, and it’s not really cheating. This is a simple, useful lesson it’s taken me a year (or perhaps my whole lifetime) to learn. That’s the transformative part of my Parisian lingerie experience.

Here’s the embarrassing part. The next day, James and I took the train to pick up our daughter Ella from camp. I had hastily thrown on a button-up V-neck blouse that I had worn many times before without incident. This time, my push-up bra pushed so much that the top button kept coming undone, revealing a lot more about myself than I wanted to show to Ella’s camp counselors and her new camp friends and their families. I would have killed for a safety pin.

When I reunited with Ella, she hugged me and said, “Your bra is showing.”  

The director of her camp, a 20-something guy with a goatee and a hoodie, whom I had just been chatting with, smiled at me as I said, “oops” and quickly buttoned up.

“It’s OK,” Ella said. “It’s a pretty one. Very sexy.”

I’m probably not the only person who has a recurring nightmare of being in my underwear when everyone else is clothed. It may be a symbol of my secret worry of revealing too much, in general, about myself.

Next time my buttons burst, I’ll try to remember the saleswoman at Etam, who was making no effort to hide her hot-pink bra behind her almost-transparent blouse. I’m still too shy to dare something like that, even in my dreams. But I’m going home a little more “push”-y than I was before.

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Bon Courage

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It’s happening. Our time is Paris is about to expire. We will be here for another month, but people are starting to leave for summer trips. I can no longer pretend that we won’t have to say good-bye.

The person I will miss the most is my friend G. The other day, another friend, S., complimented my French, and I told her I have G. to thank. When I arrived here, my French was functional, grammatical, perfectly acceptable. But I was scared to open my mouth. I didn’t want to appear foolish by making mistakes.

Now I speak without fear. Even though G.’s English is impeccable, we speak French almost exclusively, even on the phone (which is the hardest), even with street noise in the background. She is patient and encouraging and puts me at ease.

Sure I made mistakes. G. gently corrected my dipthongs and gender mix-ups, taught me subtleties of slang, and explained cultural enigmas. Thanks to her, I now put my bread on the table instead of my plate and choose French chocolate (which has more cocoa versus butter) instead of Belgian. She’s explained the intricacies of French law, recommended French novels, baked me apple pies and introduced me to the joys of raclette, which is much better than fondue.

She has also made me realize that my inferiority complex is silly. So what if I have an American accent, as long as people can understand me? I’ve always considered French accents in English charming. So maybe my English accent isn’t as ugly as I thought.

I was surprised when G. told me that when she lived in America, she was concerned about making cultural gaffes, too. She even had a handbook for French expats on how to fit in in America. It hadn’t occurred to me that cultural understanding is a two-way street, that even French people can feel out of place and afraid of appearing foolish when they’re away from home and don’t understand the rules.

S. told me, “One thing you don’t mention in your blog is that being an American in France makes you exotic in a positive way. Different can also mean interesting.” She’s right, of course. We’re not still in middle school, yearning above all else to just blend in.

When I return to America, I will be a little bit braver. I’ll stop worrying about messing up. I’ll dare to stand out, even when I don’t need to.

Wish me bon courage. It’s a phrase that means both “good luck” but also “I hope you will have the courage to do what you need to.” Thanks to this year in France, thanks to my hugely warm and welcoming guide and friend, I think I will.