The first week in France seems to have passed off peacefully. The science teacher spent 20 minutes telling the class about the IRA and also asked her whether she knew why U2 were so called, she did not. It reminds me of her saying how they had had a discussion in class on defining a terrorist and many of her classmates had started with, “a foreigner” as a defining characteristic. I’m not sure that this would be the first thing that any Irish person of my age would say, on the contrary.
The English teacher (she sits in English class) is a big anglophile and herself is finding this….surprising. It is a different perspective on English culture from that which she gets in her Irish medium school at home. The English teacher is also filled with confidence and has already corrected herself on how to pronounce Greenwich: “There is a w, it has a w sound,” she told my firstborn. You have to admire the confidence of someone correcting a native speaker.
Her state exam (Junior Cert) results arrived mid-week and, in fairness to her, they were good. She celebrated by going on a bat walk with her host family – not, perhaps as big a deal in France as they are in Ireland.
From next week she is going to cycle in to school and, very exciting, there are segregated cycle lanes the whole way. Also, she says that the town is delightful in the way of a town that has been rich for a very long time. I would like to visit but I fear that it might be frowned upon.
