The last class on a sunny Friday afternoon. I remember the feeling, back in high school. A buzz in the air, maybe a date that night, sometimes a football game, plans with friends. After class I would leave the building slow, walk home slow, feel like I had conquered something, I guess. Made it through another week.

Students enter the room in twos and threes. The French teacher greets them in French. Most answer in French, for the first sentence at least. I don’t feel the weekend buzz that they are feeling, or that I hope they are feeling. A few of them talk about their plans. The teacher shuts the door and here we go.

Le passé composé. Does every French class start with the passé composé? They make groups and start sorting sticky notes, each with a word, in order to complete full sentences with proper grammar and logical meaning. We’ll see how they do.

Tu es, Ils ont, Il est … I watch the group nearest me. They know those words go together, now to find the rest of the sentence. 

Elle joué de tennis à Paris ? Hmm… I know there is a problem there. Where is the helping verb?

J’ai fini. That’s better. Subject, helping verb, past participle, 1, 2, 3.

There must be about five sentences they can make. They keep moving the sticky notes. They have to respect verbs that reflect singular and plural, but only if the helping verb is être. Avoir doesn’t have a similar requirement. They have to respect conjugations. And of course the final product must make sense. 

Language is a puzzle.

I just finished reading The Shortest History of Europe by John Hirst earlier this week. There was a map of western Europe with the line between Romance languages, the languages that the Romans had a hand in through military success and eventual defeat, and Germanic languages, the languages of the less organized tribes that managed to keep the Roman armies busy. This classroom is located on the Romance language side of that border,  just a bit south. The students here are learning the language that is spoken outside of this classroom, out there in the town. If the school were an hour north of here they’d be learning German. I think about this language border. because there is a string of flags strung across the classroom, the cantons of Switzerland, dividing the class in two. The flags represent French, Italian, and German speaking areas, since the line between Romance and Germanic languages runs right through Switzerland, where we are. As Hirst wrote, for a dead language Latin is a lively corpse, present with us here in this classroom in its broken form called French. Don’t share that last bit with the French. They can get touchy about that.

Of course the folks in Europe spread these languages around the world during centuries of colonization. That legacy is here in our class, too. We listen to a song by MC One, a young musician from the Ivory Coast. He raps in French with plenty of vocabulary from his home country, from Congo, from Cameroon.The chorus of the song, Africain, is a list of a number of African countries: Senegal, Mali, Burkina Faso, Congo, Cameroon, Ivory Coast, Nigeria. In the video he points to the flags as he sings. It’s upbeat and positive. We listen twice and in the silence afterwards the music continues inside my head in that silent way that music can play in our thoughts. I listen to it, or I remember it, with a smile. I tap my foot. I’m not sure what verb to use for music in my thoughts. I’m not listening really, I’m not hearing, yet the music is there. Just the word for this phenomenon is missing.

Language is a puzzle that’s been put together so many times by so many hands some pieces just aren’t there.