It's a Circus

A friend of Gerald's recently told him that when things get frustrating here - instead of getting all worked up about it - just pretend it's a circus. "Oh my! What could be next? What a surprise!"

It is with this attitude that we have tried to approach the last few weeks of schooling (or lack thereof) for Katrina. On September 13 she had a three-hour sit down French entrance exam. Did I mention she's six? "Hello! This is not NASA!" as my friend Jacquie says. Anyway, Katrina survived the test with only a few tears. Her teacher kept telling me not to worry, which of course made me worry. We had been told the test would be translated, but the System changed its mind. We blamed Paris.

Two weeks after the test, we finally received an email that said the results were in. Like a hopeful high-school basketball player, I raced over to the school to see The List. Katrina was on it - yippee! But wait - what is this? Only 18 out of 38 students were accepted? Among those rejected - children who are fully tri-lingual and others who are brilliant! Aside from the normal tears of a mother who is terribly disappointed, mothers cried too because this is a shame-based culture - and they had been publicly disgraced. Everything came unglued. Everyone blamed Paris. What is this heartless testing and random grading system? Many of the faculty and staff whose children had been promised an education saw that idea go down the drain. In spite of it all, school was to start the next day for the lucky few.

Then the university called of school. The president of AUI was informed. Within a day of him finding out, the French Ambassador had been called, and - "Poof!" the problem was fixed like a magic trick. All the children who did not pass were accepted. Now there's a man with some power. School starts Monday - four weeks late. I'll believe it when I see it. We have already been informed this acceptance of all the children an exception. Next year they'll test and jolly well follow the results, they say (that's a loose translation).

Over and under all this drama there lingers the question that is now commonly voiced - if this System is so inflexible, unaccommodating and impossible to work with (I could go on and on with examples from just this month) - why do we want our children to go its school? Some are already talking about alternatives including starting another school, but right now we are just waiting to see what the classroom will be like in hopes that the worst is over.

For all its flaws, I have come to a greater and greater appreciation of the American education system through all of this.

And what happened in the mean time as children had no where to go during the day? Kids kept showing up at our door and playing for hours and hours. They began to fight. They got bored. They put makeup on other people's cats. That's when I decided something needed to be done. For six days I did two hours of activities with the kids in the morning. I usually had 8 - 10 munchkins over and we had a really wonderful time together. The picture above is from one of our days together.

So now we'll sit back and wait for the next ring of the circus to start. That is scheduled for Monday night - the parents vs. the French system meeting. Should be interesting.