"ello, my name is Baguette."

It was a beautiful, sunny afternoon at an elementary school in downtown Marseille, and the second-graders were ripping out each other's hair as they wailed their wolf mating song in the blood-soaked schoolyard. Schools in France, or at least in Marseille, don't have playgrounds - instead they throw 100 kids loose in the terrace to run around screaming at the top of their lungs like wild animals. This is what I listened to as I waited in the teachers' lounge for my first day.

I taught two classes, the equivalent of kindergarten and first grade. It's freaking hard to learn a second language. I tried to teach the first graders a pretty simple hello song, and they looked at me like I was singing this:



More like I was a really beautiful superhero singing that while levitating and shooting lasers. One of the kids whispered "she's such a beautiful singer." They were really enthusiastic. I would sing "Get up on your feet!" and they would repeat "Waaa-haaa-vaaaaa-yaa-MEEE!"

Kindergarten didn't fare as well. They spent the whole hour raising their fingers and asking "How do you say gold? How do you say scab? How do you say giraffe? How do you say earrings?" They also had a hard time believing that I understood them.

KID: How do you say butterfly?
ME: butterfly.
KID: It's a little bug, with colorful wings
ME: yes, in English it's butterfly
KID: it's very small, it comes from a caterpillar.
ME: in English the word for it is butterfly.
2ND KID: you should draw a picture and show it to her next week, then she'll understand.

But they all completely loved me, and kept grinning at me and hugging me, and they were super well behaved. One kid told me his name was Baguette, but he said it so politely and was such a good singer, that it was hard to get too mad at him. Those French kids love their baguettes. At the end some kids gave me pictures, and they all couldn't wait for next week.



I'm assuming next week a six-year-old will walk up to me and tell me that she saw a butterfly with gold earrings bite a giraffe and give it a nasty scab. Minds like steel traps, those six-year-olds.