What I did on my holidays
On a recent trip to Normandy on the Newhaven to Dieppe ferry, I stumbled on an idea so good yet simple I am astonished it has never been tried before: French lessons on the ferry. Babette Kundrat of Cosmofil runs 50-minute classes on the Transmanche service for £6, or £10 for a couple, children being free. It's an excellent way to fill the four hours of the crossing, in between the rituals of watching the last of England disappear and the French coast appear at the voyage's beginning and end.
On the outward trip I joined a group of distinctly mixed abilities. It included adults and children, people with no French at all and those with a good grounding in the language. In spite of the wide spread we all learnt something. I enjoyed it so much I took a class on the return journey, and had the benefit of a 1:1 teacher-student ratio. When Babette explained to me the prepositional use of y and en, I was taken back to a hot summer afternoon at school over forty years ago when a master, possibly Mr Billingshurst or Mr Seymour, tried to teach the same point to me and my fellow schoolboys in 2 Alpha.
The school, the Perse, had a formidable reputation for language teaching. Long before I arrived, Chouville and de Glehn had pioneered the use of the Direct Method in teaching French. Indeed, the school's most famous teacher, its headmaster from 1902 to 1928, W D H Rouse, applied the same method to teaching classics†. I was lucky to start French at the age of eight at the prep school. Later, in the first form at the Upper School, I can recall being exposed to educational technology, in the shape of a tape-slide programme on the lives of M. and Mme. Thibaut. I remember little about la famiile Thibaut, except that they lived in a flat in Paris, and had children and a dog; but the fictional families of language teaching blur in my memory, and I would be hard put to distinguish them from the family in Latin classes, who owned a dog called Cerberus.
Later came O and A level, and Racine, Molière, Voltaire, Zola, Camus and Sartre. I also took German to O level with Mr Mitchell, Latin O level with Mr Dunkeley, and a year's worth of Russian with Mr Youdale. The proof of the school's reputation in languages is demonstrated by the careers of my contemporaries, for example David Yeandle, now a distinguished German scholar, who, I remember as a schoolboy, helped by his friend Rupert Limentani, son of a great Dante expert, inventing a language, complete with noun-declensions, irregular verbs, the works.
More modestly, I found that, under Babette's patient pedagogy, much returned that I had forgotten. I found, to my surprise, that I achieved that state that my teachers had always described as the aim of all language teaching, of finding myself thinking in the language.
†Direct Method and the Classics
C. W. E. Peckett
The Classical Journal, Vol. 46, No. 7 (Apr., 1951), pp. 331-367
