bombe, menace et autre amusement/ Bomb, threat and other funny stuff

Bonsoir tout le monde!

De retour au lycée après un long week end...Le lundi a été difficile pour les collègues: quelqu'un a appelé le commissariat pour dire qu'il y avait une bombe au lycée! Résultat: évacuation mouvementé et attente à l'extérieur en attendant que le (seul) chien renifleur à 10 km à la ronde puisse passer la truffe dans l'ensemble du lycée !
Du coup ce matin pas cours, pour que les chers petits aient le temps de venir rechercher leurs précieuses affaires abandonnées dans la panique hier soir. Beaucoup de profs prédisent avec un mélange pervers de fatalisme et d'espoir l'enclenchement d'une longue série d'alertes à la bombe qui viendrait perturber les derniers cours avant Noël. D'autres remarquent qu'il est heureux que les chiens détecteurs de bombes ne soient pas les mêmes qui recherchent la drogue.

Pour ma part, j'essaie de rester concentré sur un paquet de copies particulièrement médiocres que m'ont rendu mes 1ère ES...C'est très difficile. Il n'y avait pourtant que quatre pauvres questions de cours à propos de l'Europe et de la construction européenne. Certains élèves n'ont rien compris et rien appris, mélangent tout et produisent un charabia épouvantable: quand je demande comment l'Union remédie aux inégalités entre les territoires (j'attendais une petite réponse de cours sur les fonds structurels) une élève me redonne l'histoire des bombardements de l'OTAN sur la Serbie et la paix de Dayton?!
L'après midi, à mon grand soulagement, la conseillère d'orientation est enfin là pour faire un exposé à mes animaux de Terminale S, ceux-la même dont le conseil a fourni matière à mon dernier billet. L'un d'eux, S m'agresse immédiatement: il est furieux parce que j'ai rapporté dans un rapport comment il avait longuement développé dans mon cours la thèse fumeuse et raciste selon laquelle les Indiens envahissent les cités et en chassent les Arabes, et qu'en plus "ils puent" S a beau être maghrébin, il est tout aussi capable de propos racistes. Comme il est surtout très bête, il pense qu'en me menaçant (sans que je comprenne très bien de quoi) je vais retirer le dit rapport...quand j'en rédige un autre..."Faites gaffe, M'sieur, Faites gaffe, dès que vous allez dire quelque chose..."
Aujourd'hui, il nous arrive d'être comparé à des policiers ou des gardiens de prison. Un élève de cette même classe m'a dit un jour "M'sieur de toute façon, vous, les profs, vous êtes comme la police, vous avez toujours raison". C'est lorsque l'on entend des propos aussi cons que l'on a vraiment envie de démissionner.

Ce n'est pas mon cas. J'ai décidé aujourd'hui d'être le coordinateur du projet "Sciences Po" qui vise à présenter nos meilleurs élèves pour que l'IEP en recrute un ou deux au nom de la "diversité". Il y aurait beaucoup à dire sur le programme lui même, mais j'essaie d'expliquer aux élèves que lorsqu'on vous présente une chance aussi sensationnelle (passer du 9-3 à Sciences Po) il faut tenter de la saisir. Dans cette Terminale si pénible, deux élèves sont discrètement venus me voir à la fin du cours pour me dire qu'ils voudraient participer au programme. ça a sauvé ma journée!



Good evening everyone!
Today I was back at the school after a nice and long weekend. Monday had been tough for everyone: someone called the police and told them a bomb was about to explode in the school! My colleagues had to abort all classes and go outside (in the street) with the kids for hours until the sole anti bomb dog in a 10 miles radius could sniff around all the school! This morning all classes had been canceled, so the dear little kids could come back and get their stuff they had abandoned in the panic. A lot of teachers predict, with a fatalistic tone and also some pervert enthusiasm, that this is only the beginning of a long series of fake alarms that would wreck the daily routine of the lycée until Christmas. Others underline the fact that it was a good point the antibomb dog is of a different sort than the antidrug one...

On my part, I'm trying to stay focus on my 11th graders essays and it ain't easy! This was a very basic 4-questions-in-an-hour-test about the lesson! We had just completed a long chapter about Europe and the birth and development of the European Union. I had explained the quandary of defining a "European identity", underlined the Turkish admission quagmire, also described the 2 main European policies "Common Agricultural Policy" and the "Structural Funds" which give Euros to underprivileged regions of the Union (in the Past in Spain or Ireland today mostly in Eastern Europe). But they didn't get it at all! One of the question asked was "How the Union tries to cure economic inequalities?" simply inviting the student to tell all what s/he had learned about the "Structural Funds" policy. One particularly lost student of mine told me NATO was used to that effect, i.e. when they bombed the asses of the Yougos back in 1995 to achieve the Dayton agreement...
After lunch, to my great despair I was due to meet again my terrible 12th graders. But some Deity had heard my complaint for the rare and fantomatic "Professional Adviser" woman -who has to work on 3 schools at the same time...being capable of this remarkable performance of advising and counseling some 4000 kids at the same time- did come to the class to tell what exactly they could do and how, yes, they could, one day, find an honest and legal way to sustain their living, buy Nike shoes and American baseball hat (with size labels on it, so it's really authentic!)...Some of my worst student did ask how to enter "classe prepa" which are classes that prepared students to Ivy League university...And it was no joke. But most seriously, S, a young (he is 20) Arab came to me pretty furious, with the clear intention of impressing like we were in the ghetto. S has a big mouth and is pretty dumb; but he thinks he knows stuff. Last week he did tell the class how the Indians were "invading" the housing project where he lives, and how "they stinks". In France, this is racist slur, and this is a misdemeanor. In a court of law, you could be fined and even jailed for expressing a racist point of view or denying the Holocaust. It's pretty unbelievable to English or American people, I know. So I had filled a "report" concerning S' terrible point of view which must have led the "Educational Advisor" (EA) to remind S how bad this was. S being pretty dumb, he thought that threatening me would lead me to cancel the report. He said "Be careful, Sir, be careful! If you say anything, I'm gonna, I'm gonna..." I'd never know what he exactly has in store for me: aggression? Gun? Dog? Knife? My car burned? Afterward I joked with the EA to whom I brought a 2nd report about the threat: if I were to be a victim of an agression by S...this was the jackpot! Official recommendation, media, news, Sarkozy, T.V?!

Anyway, sometime we got compare to "cops". One of those 12 graders, 20 years old told me once "You, the teachers, you're just like the cops, you're always right" Such statement do encourage people to quit their job.

But I didn't. On the opposite, today I volunteered to head the special project on "Sciences Po". "Sciences Po", a.k.a. "Institut d'Etudes Politiques de Paris" is a prestigious Parisian institution which can only be compared to an Ivy League institution like Harvard, Yale or Cambridge in England. However "Sciences Po" only deals with Humanities, Law and Politics. It's the school for high level Civil Servants, lawyers, judges, journalists, history researcher in politics, etc...Its director loves the U.S. and has decided to implement an affirmative action of his own. While most of the students admitted at "Sciences Po" are coming from heavily favored and white background, the director has signed a convention with schools like mine which would propose for direct admissions a bunch of gifted individuals even though they might not be straight As students. This sounds very normal in the U.S. but in France it's revolutionary! Before no one would ever ever dare to challenge the "meritocracy" of exams and tests...Anyway, I will help to train our best students to talk later with a jury of Sciences Po professors who might select 1 or 3 of them to go to their university.

At the end of the session with the 12th graders, once S and his threat was long gone, two kids, S another young Arab, but eager for knowledge, shy and discrete and C a white girl, came to tell me they would like to enter the program for "Sciences Po". This is the kind of thing that make people stick to their job!