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In the Gustave Eiffel vocational school in he Paris suburb where Chantal Collin teaches, it is not unusual for students to attempt to set fire to the school. Some have already had problems with the law. One victim of a schoolyard “racket” recently came to school with a breadknife in his schoolbag. Although such incidents are infrequent, the combination of delinquency, parental unemployment and the collision of cultures—80 percent of the students are of immigrant origin—means that violence is never far from the surface. “Rights without responsibilities”, is how Chantal sums upp the attitude of many students. “With second-generation unemployment, they are used to living on welfare and getting advice from social workers on entitlements.” This can cause headaches. “One boy dropped out for a whole term but still expected to move up a class,” says Chantal, remarking that his father also say this as a right. Only 10 percent of parents ever visit the school. Many, she feels, have abdicated their responsibilities. “Our training has not prepared us for this kind of situation,” remarks Chantal, who would like to receive specialized help to deal with disturbed teenagers. “Some students have never been taught how to behave. They leave the room without asking, they enter without knocking, they walk around during class.” This incivility affects morale in both classroom and staffroom: more than one teacher has had a nervous breakdown. 
A teacher of seventeen years’ standing, Chantall believes the students’ problem is the low self-esteem that comes from repeated failure. “I try to understand how learning takes place, and what has gone wrong when it doesn’t. I set about giving them confidence in their ability to lean.“ To establish a diagnosis, she asks students to memorize a photograph down to the smallest detail. Later, when they describe it from memory, she asks them how they managed. “They’d say ‘I thought about it on the bus’ or ‘I remembered it every time I passed your door’ or ‘I thought of one detail first and then built up the picture.’” After demonstrating that learning can take many forms, Chantal assures students that they can apply the same techniques to a text, for example, to one of the made-to-measure workbooks she has prepared on her computer at home. Her greatest pleasure is to hear the words, “I understand now.”The visual and auditory play a major role in Chantal’s methods. “I use a lot of eye contact,” she admits. She speaks affectionately of how one boy, who towered above her, offered to be her bodyguard. “I don’t have any discipline problems,” she smiles. “At first I felt like a lion-tamer going into the cage. It was eat or be eaten.” Her students often say: “Madame, if you had pistols for eyes, we’d all be dead!” |
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cyberschoolbus@un.org
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