My French teacher had the unfortunate surname “Seaman”. You know, like a Man of the Sea. Not like jizz. Think about sailors. Nautical masters of the waves. Don’t think about male ejaculate.
She taught us French from kindergarten up through 8th grade. Her daughter was in my year, and I shudder to think how she survived high school with the name Seaman. We all grew up together from kindergarten and had no concept of seminal fluids until much later. We were also sheltered private-church-school kids who were afraid of the repercussions that might come from mocking her unfortunate name. Mind you, it wasn’t pronounced ‘Shayman’ or ‘Zeemahn’, it was pronounced ‘Semen’. Exactly like the genetic fluid expressed from a human male penis.
Anyway, Mrs Seaman’s class was fun until 7th grade. She taught in an old-fashioned style revolving around memorizing nouns and conjugation tables. At least, she used to teach that way. My older sister had the benefit of her original style. It was tedious and you did not learn how to actually speak French so much as you learned how to translate it. They would learn to pronounce correctly, but the idea of having a natural conversation with a native French speaker was basically unthinkable. That was fine though. The kids would graduate 8th grade and move on to High School where they would actually learn a language. The students from Advent would have the advantage of knowing lots and lots of nouns and verbs.
The year after my older sister graduated 8th grade, Mrs. Seaman was introduced to French in Action. FIA was the latest concept in language learning. It was ‘immersive’ which meant watching videos entirely in French with no English whatsoever. The idea was to focus on actually conversing and hearing the language spoken rather than looking at lists of nouns and tables of verbs. It has been proven effective since its inception in the 90s. Mrs Seaman was introduced to it and she fell in love with some aspects of it. The problem was that it was an all-inclusive program. You weren’t meant to skip around or change the curriculum. Mrs. Seaman wanted to keep using some of her worksheets and xeroxes from old lessons. For me it highlighted how little I had been paying attention in her class up til then. I had no problem with the French immersion videos and cassette tapes, but her lists of verbs to conjugate made no sense. I was able to limp along as a C student. She took issue with that, but the way her grades were weighted it meant I would never fail her class, just the parts from her old curriculum. The new stuff was easy and you felt accomplished when you spoke whole sentences in French.
Our school ended at 8th grade and we would all be moving on to high school where we could actually choose what language to take. I was pretty vocal about hating French and never wanting to study it again. Realistically, it’s a stupid thing to learn in Alabama. It was an effort to make the private school seem more classy. If they actually cared about our education, it would have been Spanish we studied. So few Americans even have a passport. These kids might use their French briefly when on vacation in Paris. There are those elite few who actually take their education to a place like Haiti or West Africa, but 99.99% of Advent students stay in Alabama and live down the road from their parents.
Mrs Seaman had to know her class was garbage. There was nothing to judge it against. One of the many pointless endeavours were the Christmas Carols we learned phonetically in French. Every year Mr Rick Phillips put on his self aggrandized circle jerk of Christmas music. It would dominate the months of November and December. Mrs Seaman’s class stopped doing French lessons for six weeks and started learning a French carol. We’d listen to tapes and repeat back to her. Later Mr Rick would just take her class time and we’d practice the song around his piano. At no point did they translate it for us. Our language skills were shit and the song was all about things like archangels and the Christ child and the manger and biblical shit that had no bearing on modern life. These were not words we had studied.
Anyway, she called our home one time when I was there alone. It was after 8 and my parent were out to dinner. My sister had a car and a social life. I was 13. I remember it being extra weird and feeling like I was in trouble and it was my standard reaction was to be apologetic and absorb another lecture about how I wasn’t applying myself and would fail out and repeat the grade or whatever threat it was. She was slurring her words, which took me years to understand what that meant. She kept repeating herself about how I had failed so and so pop quiz and how if I didn’t start working extra hard I wasn’t going to be able to go on the six flags trip in spring or maybe I wouldn’t even get to go to France with the class after 8th grade. I remember telling her that I had no intention of going to Paris with the class and I had already discussed it with my parents. My sister had a dim view of the French program at Advent and she said the class trip was spent mostly in hotel rooms. She had since visited France with our grandparents and said the Advent trip was a waste of time. She also convinced me to take Latin, which I think was one of the best decisions of my life.
So Mrs Seaman threatened to deny me a place on the class trip and I did not care, which made her mad. She repeated all the same things again and asked to speak to my parents, who weren’t home. She was angry and said we’d finish this conversation at school, but that never happened. I assume she sobered up and realized the bullet she had dodged by not talking to my parents. I told them she called and they thought it was weird. They were certain I meant her daughter had called me, but I insisted it was my French teacher who called apropos of nothing to tell me I was failing her class, which wasn’t true. So I missed the France trip, which I was happy about. I did not care about the wonder and mystique of the City of Lights. I could not care less about all the Catholic Churches. We were not allowed to have wine or even coffee. It would have been another week of Mrs Seaman belittling me.
So that was that. Mrs Seaman was a shitty teacher who decided to belittle me. I’m happy I never have to see her again.