LEARNING FRENCH

LEARNING FRENCH

By Martha Patterson

My high school French class was a revelation – Bernie F., our teacher, had brilliant blue eyes and dark hair, was probably in his 30s, and fired vocabulary questions at us in every class as if we were Gestapo soldiers ready to salute him.

Newton North High, in Massachusetts, was an old, three-building school in the Boston suburbs and was renowned for its high level of educational standards. There was actually a campus – making it more like an institution of higher education than a high school. The late movie stars Bette Davis and Jack Lemmon, I was told, had attended high school there.

My classmates and I were typical high school students of the ‘70s, wearing bell-bottomed jeans and plaid flannel work shirts, even if we were girls. We wore Vibram-soled hiking boots on our feet and, on our rock & roll-listening-heads, invariably long hair.

“Formidable!” Bernie would shout in his classroom, if we answered a grammatical question correctly or got an “A’ on a test. He drilled us, at every class, on tenses of verbs and our vocabulary. I learned more French in that one year than I did in the entire other six years I spent studying French, because Bernie expected so much of us.

The most fun part was “cooking French.” We made Cherries Jubilee, which we ignited in the classroom, and feasted on Escargots - snails - dripping in garlicky butter. Bernie F. believed in teaching us the cuisine of France – it was part of the fun of being a Francophile.

One day a budding feminist in our class walked out because of some comment Bernie had made about the role of women in American society – I don’t even remember exactly what he said, but it might have been something to the effect that women needed and desired to be protected. Bernie didn’t want her to leave, but she was firm in her “statement” and nothing more came of the matter – she showed up without apology at the next class anyway.

I liked Bernie even though I found him tremendously intimidating. Once he showed us a photograph of him and his pretty, blonde wife taken while they were on a trip to Provence. I was impressed that he had such a beautiful wife.

One day he told us he would bring his friend, the English actor Tom Baker, who was starring in the British “Doctor Who” show, to class to meet us. But Bernie never brought him. Probably such TV stars are hard to obtain for lectures to high school classrooms in Massachusetts while they are visiting the U.S. on promotional tours. I was disappointed but it was still exciting to know that Bernie was friends with this guy – I aspired to be an actress myself in those days.

When our old high school was torn down a couple of years later to make room for a big, new high school that was contained in one building, and which we were not allowed to leave between classes, I regretted losing the old high school, which felt like a college campus, with its spacious yards in front of the buildings and a street down the middle where the “bikers” among the school population raced their motorcycles. Bernie had held us captive in Building I, with our cooking sessions and drills on French vocabulary, and his firm belief in the possibility of getting kids excited about learning a foreign language.

“Formidable!” Bernie would cry as he handed us back our exams. I always felt proud when I had passed one of his tests with flying colors. And I ended up scoring in the 700s on my oral French SATs for college – a feat I could never have accomplished without his strict tutelage.

“Bien sur,” I say now to people who ask if I speak French, “Je parle un peu.” “Of course, I speak a little.” How could I not, having had the great Bernie F. as my teacher? He was “formidable”!!