Foreign Perspectives

James went on his first school excursion last Friday.

Not a massive one, of course, since he’s in the nursery school. As we’re in a wine growing area it was to a vineyard where they gathered some grapes and went through the whole process of wine production (except the fermentation, naturally). Thoroughly enjoyed by all and each child was sent home with a bottle of the grape juice that was produced on the day.

One difference from the equivalent schools in the UK is that small excursions such as this one seem to be very common in the schools here with an average of around one a month throughout the year. As in most things in France, they usually ask for a “contribution” towards the cost of these but aren’t terribly insistent on actually getting the money.

As we’re in a country area, this excusion even qualified as news and the photo on the left is from the Independant which managed to run up a 1/4 page article on it in todays paper.

Of course, there are books similar to that in the UK which depict a typical first day in nursery school. The difference is that in France, the drawings in the book look almost identical to the school that James goes to. Not because the drawings are of his school but rather that the schools are very standardised in France. Not so long ago for instance, if it was October 5th and you were in the fifth year then you were on page 5 of the maths book, regardless of where you were in France.

So there’s a very similar little cloakroom in other schools and zero privacy for the kids going to the toilet. Actually, I suspect that the drawing of children going to the toilet would be contrary to one or two laws in the UK.

Anyway, we’ve read the book to James in English. That’s probably not quite what the school intended us to do but to get him fully bilingual we need to balance his French and English; the simplest way to do that at the moment seems to be to use English all the time when he’s at home and keep the French to school time.

Want a laugh? Wendy’s going to propose us as parent representatives for the school board.

No more FP’s for a week as I’m off to Belfast tomorrow and won’t have any computer power ’til Saturday week.

Since then, the butcher has closed, the bank has closed and when we walked round the village in July the sheer number of boarded up shops was quite a shock. That’s what happens when a village is almost completely dependent on a single industry and that industry hits hard times.

Yet, even in these hard times for the wine industry, the English have been busy buying up vineyards in the area. More intrestingly perhaps is that they are much more successful at running the vineyards than the locals. Whereas the locals simply can’t shift their 2‚€ wines, the English are selling their stock at 25‚€ a bottle. How come? Simple really: the locals are trying to sell the cheap plonk that they’ve always sold in the way that they’ve always sold it but peoples’ tastes have changed. They drink less wine these days but it’s higher quality wine that they drink nowadays.

It’s not just the vineyards that the English are buying in the area. I’m told that some 90 English familes have bought property in Paziol for instance. So many in fact, that Paziol is pretty much an English village now.

Other indications that things aren’t good economically in this area is the closure of the Rolex shop in Perpignan. OK, people aren’t going to nip out and buy a Rolex every day but it is an indication that there’s a distinct shortage of money across the Pyrenees Orientale.

The downturn in the wine business has depressed property prices even more in an area that’s still relatively affordable so perhaps now would be a good time to buy in this area.

From then, things really happen quite quickly here with the first appearance of the baby grapes in early May until the grapes are pretty much fully formed about mid-June. During this time, the farmers are busy in the fields getting their plants attached to the strings holding them up (the plants in this field are quite old so aren’t tied up).

Once into June, things generally slow down. The plants have all been sprayed and it’s the time for the work inside the winery to get underway in preparation for the harvest. Although you don’t see so much activity in the fields, things are far from quiet inside the various wineries.

In our area, the harvest gets underway towards the end of August (the date varies depending on the weather) and it’s pretty much over by mid-September. As you can see, the plants deteriorate pretty quickly after the harvest but the surroundings remain green well into November. In fact, garden plants and the like don’t start growing ’til it cools down a little so the burnt appearance of gardens is replaced by greenery (except in those gardens maintained by very keen gardeners).

Things change pretty slowly in the wine business with the local vines being replaced over a cycle of 40 years which means that you get about 36 years worth of wine from each plant as it takes four years before the first grapes appear. The bulk of grapes are still harvested by hand though this year European money has obviously arrived in big dollops as there are an awful lot of brand new grape picking machines. That does seem a little bit counterproductive in that those machines are generally used for the grapes producing lower quality wine which is the bulk of what makes up the growing lake of unsellable wine in Europe and, of course, doesn’t really help the unemployment statistics either.

Now he doesn’t want to go at all and every day he comes out crying which is no good. Nursery school is supposed to be a fun place to be, not somewhere you hate to go.

Why the change in him? Well, lots of reasons but mainly down to two: 1) all the activities revolve around those for 2/3 year olds and 2) they’ve sat him with an older mentally handicapped child who absolutely terrifies him.

We were expecting the first aspect to cause problems. After all, the toys and activities are, understandly, targetted at a much younger age group so few of them interest him and, more to the point, those of the original class were really attractive to him. Not only that, but whereas the kids in the first class were talking to him all day (and he was starting to understand what was said), the younger kids are only just learning to speak so the only person that talks to him now is the teacher. Consequently, we think that it will take him much, much longer to learn French in the new class. My guess is that it will be years rather than the months that it should have been.

The second aspect is typically French. James can’t speak French, the other child can’t speak, so they lump them together. In effect, it’s the nursery school version of CIPPA (see First day at school in France).

So how come they were expecting James to be speaking his first French words within 2 or 3 weeks? Well, it seems that all their previous experience of non-French speaking kids has been with Spanish (and, possibly, Catalan) speakers. Spanish is very similar to French and therefore it’s relatively easy for a Spanish speaking child to pick up French in a few weeks. English is a totally different language. It will probably take a few months before James starts coming out with the odd French word or phrase.

Anyway, we’re taking our own advice and going to the school on Monday to have him moved back into the proper class. If they won’t do that (and we don’t expect that they will), we’re changing schools as he’s definitely not going back to that class anymore. However, as Wendy points out, now that they’ve labelled him as as a problem, it’ll be harder to get him into another school and perhaps impossible.