(note from G): School is awsome. There are lots of nice kids, but some kids are mean.
I have two teachers one is named Laurance and the other one is named Vallerie. I
praffer..... School is harder in france because I don't understand french as well as
everybode else. One thing I love about school in Paris is that you get Wednesday off.
So thats the day I (and P) do most of our activities ex: soccer, contemporary, hip hop.
Here we have a cantine [cafiteria].
I spent a lot of time last school year researching Paris schools. We knew we could not send the girls to a public school for the simple reason that we wouldn't have a permanent address at the time of la rentree, in September. Public schools are local schools, so we would have had to change their schools a month or so into the school year once we found our permanent apartment. And, frankly, while we have heard that the public schools are generally very good -- especially in the more uniformly middle/upper class areas where we wanted to live -- we have also heard many not-so-glowing reports about the public schools, both from French people and expats. One thing we've heard is that the schools do very little to foster community. You drop your child off and pick them up at the end of the day. One expat we know who did a year at a public school here said he had only been allowed inside the school twice all year. Also, that the teachers can be very strict/mean (from expats) and not terribly engaged at all (from French families). One French family said that since they are government employees with very safe jobs, the teachers seem to do the absolute minimum amount of work, including approximately 10 days of strikes per year. Who knows? This is all hearsay, and I'm just passing it on. I do know one expat family here who loves their public school and has had none of these issues. Of course, it's a school in the 6th -- one of the nicest areas in the city. And you could easily make the same sorts of criticisms about public schools in the US. So much of it comes down to teacher, classmates, and luck of the draw. But that doesn't stop us parents from obsessing about finding the perfect school for our children!
While hunting for private schools, we eliminated anything in the Western half of the city, since Anthony's job requires him to commute to the very edge of the East side of the Paris, by the Bois de Vincennes. If you know Paris, you'll quickly realize that most of the tonier neighborhoods are on the western side, closer to the Bois de Boulogne. This also means that virtually all of the high-end private and international schools are on that side as well. In the end, though, we decided we didn't want to send them to a bilingual school. They're young enough that we're not worried about what English work they'll miss, especially with my penchant for reading and writing! And we know from children coming from these bilingual schools to our immersion school in San Francisco that the level of French is harder here, but the level of English is harder in the US. This seems obvious, since you've got a huge cohort of native speakers to push the levels higher. But what it also means is that our native-English-speaking children wouldn't be very challenged in the English classes here anyway. And, in fact, we've since heard from English-speaking families here that this is entirely true. Mostly, we want them to play in French, not gravitate just to other expats, and to become as fluent as possible. What better way than to send them to a regular French school?
So we hit upon a small private school in the 5th arrondissment, right near the Seine, pretty much in the goegraphic center of where we hope live: either the 5th or the 4th. Either Anthony will cross the Seine to get to the #1 metro line and I'll walk to the girls to school, or he'll jump right on the metro, and I'll walk across the Seine to get them to school. The school is Catholic, but we were assured not very religious. Also, it is sous contract which means it is under contract with the French government, receiving funding from the state and required to be open to all. This also means the price for the school year is just over $1,000. Yes, you read that right: one thousand US dollars for the whole school year. Just one year of our US private school tuition would cover their schooling from pre-K to high school graduation! One of the few areas where French people coming to the US must get sticker shock.
The lunch cost for the year here is virtually the same price as the tuition. I happily pay the extra thousand for lunch, since it works out to roughly $6 per meal plus saves me the drudgery of making 2 lunches, 5 times per week. Our school in SF didn't have any cafeteria, in case you were wondering. This is one of the things I was most looking forward to in coming to Paris. Only other parents who make lunches every day will understand my profound levels of joy at not packing anything every morning as we walk out the door -- not even snacks! Yippee!
The school is still quite international, just by virtue of being in the relatively academic/ professional/ high-end neighborhood of the 5th. There are of course many "pure" French families, some of whom bring their children in from other neighborhoods where they live but don't like the local schools. Still, in G's small class of 19 children, there is a boy who is half-Moroccan, one who is half-German, one who is half-Thai, a girl who is half-Colombian, one who is half-Peruvian, another who is French but lived for 5 years in London, and all-American G. All of those kids are bilingual. This seems pretty representative of the population of the school as a whole, and we have found the families here to be exceptionally open, helpful, warm, and friendly. We've been offered advice, help, tea, playdates, invitations, you name it, and have instantly felt like we could seamlessly transport the entire community back to our international school in SF. The children have made our girls feel similarly welcomed. Oh, of course there are a few mean girls and a couple rough boys (we still can't tell if their complaints about the boys are genuine, or if they secretly appreciate the attention...).
G had a problem with a few mean girls at the beginning, and when I told her she'd probably just have to learn to deal with (or ignore...) mean girls all her life, she asked me in a very shocked voice, "You mean grown-ups can be mean girls, too?" Yes, sadly, they can. The trick is to surround yourself with lovely women friends and just not care about the others. This simple advice has worked wonderfully for her, and she no longer gets bothered by those girls. She's in a group of about 6 truly sweet, fun, outgoing, smart girls with families we really like. Can't beat that for only a couple weeks into school!
For the 1st grade, they had too many children, so they have 25 children in one classroom and they put 6 of the newest children into a combined K-1 class. P was assigned to this class, and I was initially very worried that she's be bored repeating K material. But they've scheduled it so that the K class goes off to swimming, dance, gym, music, recess, etc. on their own, and while they're away, the teacher has just the 6 first graders to work with. Then, while she's working with the kindergarteners, the big kids go off and join the other 25 1st grade cohorts to do their specialty classes. So in the end, her social circle is quite large, and she's getting rather a lot of special attention in class. On the other hand, she told me that for the half-hour or hour per week that they spend on English, she's the teacher. I said, "you mean you help the teacher?" "No, the teacher tells me in French what she wants me to work on, and then I ask the children questions in English and have them repeat after me." G does something similar for her class. If you know my children, or any other overly-confident/slightly-bossy children, you can imagine that this is a huge highlight for them!
School starts at 8:45am and ends at 4:30, but only 4 days per week: Mon, Tues, Thurs, Fri. No school on Wednesdays. That's a recent thing, and there's some talk of re-adding a Wed morning (or a Sat morning -- quelle horreur!) but for now, it's just 4 days per week. There's a 1 and 1/2 hr lunch/recess break when children can go home, but few do nowadays.
And finally, what else can I tell you about the girls' school experience? Let me just be the first to admit that the metric system is much easier to manipulate than our Imperial system, and that Celsius works just as well as Farenheit, perhaps better when you consider 0 is freezing. How logical! And I do like that children here are put into grades according to birth years: born in 2003? You're in grade 3! No red-shirting, not different for every school or school district, etc. Only the slightest fudging at the edges for the rare child who truly needs to be held-back or advanced. But the grade-level naming system is just preposterous. Here's the conversion chart:
US system = French system
K = GS (Grande Section. 3 year olds are in Petite Section, 4 year olds in Moyenne Section)
1 = CP (Cours Preparatoire)
2 = CE1 (Cours Elementaire 1)
3 = CE2 (Cours Elementaire 2)
4 = CM1 (Cours Moyenne 1)
5 = CM2 (Cours Moyenne 2)
6 = 6eme
7 = 5eme
8 = 4eme
9 = 3eme
10 = 2eme
11 = 1er
12 = Terminale
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