“And is children is granddaughters,” adds Fadila. “I’s old.”
The young man asks her if she has any notions of reading or writing. She shakes her head and says, “No a lot.” “Well, still,” corrects Édith, “you can write your first and last name, and read a few things here and there.”
Édith in turn—careful to do it in front of Fadila—asks whether it is true that there will not be room for all the candidates. The young man seems surprised. “We do have a lot of people this year,” he says.
The classes will begin in a week, on the 14th, at the same time and place. They will call all the candidates beforehand to confirm their enrolment.
But no one calls Fadila. On the 13th, the evening before the first class, Édith calls to find out what is happening. A young woman answers; Édith does not recognize her voice, and she confirms that Fadila Amrani has not been accepted. The reason? She doesn’t know. She is not familiar with the case.
Before telling Fadila, Édith calls other literacy centers she had located, which offer classes at the end of the afternoon. The only one that has a class at six p.m. is an association run by the mairie, the town hall of the sixteenth arrondissement. The classes are held at the mairie itself, it’s not very far from Fadila’s place, with a direct métro: it might work.
Enrolment has been closed since July, says a pleasant woman on the telephone, but very often people who have signed up drop out after a few weeks: Fadila can come and fill out a form, and they’ll have a place for her as soon as someone drops out.
Édith explains that the reason she has been so late in calling is that she was counting on another literacy center, but that Fadila was turned down because of her age. “Do you think that might be a problem?”
The woman is not surprised. “Well, obviously, a young person can learn to read and write in two years, an older person takes ten years. These are people who have never learned how to learn. Some of them have never even held a pencil.
“But we won’t exclude anyone because of their age. We are prepared to give everyone a chance.”
Fadila does not seem surprised to find out that she has not been accepted at Saint-Landry. It’s a well-known fact in her milieu: “Is Filipinos they taking all the places.”
The very next morning she goes to sign up at the mairie in the sixteenth arrondissement, where they do indeed put her on a waiting list, assuring her that they will contact her the moment a spot becomes available.
The likelihood seems slim. The prospect of resuming her lessons with Fadila leaves Édith with a weariness that merely serves to emphasize how much she had been counting on being relieved of her task.
14
Fadila, however, when they meet the following week, says to Édith, “We is going on together you and me” with so much good grace and enthusiasm that Édith is moved. This is all about Fadila, but she doesn’t seem either discouraged or skeptical.
Does she have the impression that she’s made progress with Édith, that she’s learned a lot? Or if she knows that she has learned very little, does it mean that for her even that very little is important? Does she prefer their private meetings to a class with others?
“Let’s do some reading to start with today, if that’s all right with you,” says Édith.
On a sheet of paper she writes
RER CFADILA
AMRANIRER B
RER ALARBIT
and hands the paper to Fadila: “These are all words that you know.”
Fadila does not seem convinced. She looks at the sheet, immobile. All the same, as if moving a pawn in chess, she slides her index finger over to the word AMRANI and says, “That one, is Amrani.” Then, taking heart, she points to FADILA and relaxes. “That one is me.”
“It’s your first name,” says Édith. “That’s good, you recognized it. But it’s not you, you cannot say, ‘It’s me,’ it’s your first name, Fadila.”
Before Fadila’s eyes she writes ME: “This is the word me. Look, here you have the word FADILA, and this is the word ME: they’re different. Do you understand?”
Apparently not altogether, for when Fadila points to LARBIT, she says, “Is Nasser.”
“It’s Nasser’s name,” says Édith, “the name you see on your telephone when he calls.”
“Is Larbit.”
“Exactly. There is the man who is your son, then there is his name. You know that it isn’t the same thing.”
Édith writes NASSER. “There’s something special about this word. Do you see what it is?”
Fadila cannot tell.
“It’s your son’s first name, Nasser,” says Édith. “Surely you know it.”
She has Fadila pronounce the word, insists on the sibilants, writes the letter S—“a new letter”—and points out that there are two S’s in NASSER. It is the first time they have seen a double letter. Fadila copies the S, the two S’s, the name.
“Let’s keep going,” says Édith. She writes AÏCHA. “Your daughter’s first name. Look: it begins and ends with a letter you know well.”
They work on the A, the one that occurs twice in FADILA, twice in AÏCHA, twice in AMRANI, once in NASSER and LARBIT. Édith would have liked so much for Fadila to have noticed this. It’s still too early.
The A is also what makes the difference between RER A and RER B or RER C. Édith reaches for a Paris transport map and shows her the spots, at the end of the RER lines, where it says A, B, or C: it’s like a little label stuck to the line, so that you will know that this line is the A, this one the B, and this third one the C.
Fadila has often seen people looking at these little folders in the bus or on the métro, she says. She wondered what it was.
Édith points out the stations: each little white circle stands for an RER stop.
But she is afraid that all of this is far too abstract for someone who can hardly tell the difference between a name and a person, between a word and the thing itself.
She looks again on the internet, types Teach illiterate adult to read in the search engine. She has to know what is at stake, so that she can improve her own method.
There is a huge amount of information about the subject on-line. One particular site, French as a foreign language, is a veritable encyclopedia. In addition to the references it provides to all sorts of publications on learning, on theories about the learning process, on cognitive psychology, and on the contribution of neuroscience, among other things, it also offers a free audiovisual learning method in 333 reading games, which looks extraordinary.
On other sites, pedagogues share their experience, and there are manuals for sale written by teachers who concluded that none of the existing textbooks are satisfactory. There are reports commissioned by international organizations, containing proposals for eliminating the inefficacy of adult illiteracy programs. Édith spends hours on these websites, entire evenings, taking pages of notes.
From a practical point of view she is relieved to see that, empirically, she has been doing just what is universally recommended. First and foremost the learning process has to have meaning; avoid working on information that has no significance (letters or syllables removed from any context); choose subject matter that represents a meaningful investment of time, such as first and last name. The teacher must not display any authoritarian or dogmatic behavior. Find out as much as possible about the student. Look for the single method best suited for each case.
Regarding theory, Édith reads dozens of times that motivation and commitment on the part of the student are fundamental, that the emotional side can play a decisive role (empathy of the initiator, quality of the relationship). There are fascinating pages describing everything that has come to light over the last century thanks to the contributions of psychology and, more recently, neuroscience. Experience—in other words, a lack of it, or gaps in experience—can be key in determining how easily a stu
dent will learn. Successive periods of learning have a lot to do with piling up the blocks. If the blocks at the foundation have been poorly placed, the pyramid cannot be built, it will collapse. Worse still, there are critical periods for certain stages of the learning process. Once these critical periods, and their particular dispositions, have elapsed, learning is no longer possible. Worst of all, if certain fundamental processes have not been learned when they could have been learned, other processes that depend on them (which are superimposed upon them) become impossible in turn, just as a pyramid cannot be built on a foundation that does not exist.
No one in the present day would dare to assert as aggressively as Luria did, at the height of the Soviet Union’s influence, that illiterate adults from predominantly oral cultures can display deficiencies in the mechanisms of perception, generalization, abstraction, deduction, and inference; but nor can anyone rule out that possibility.
Édith stops right there. She needs to have at least a minimum of faith in a positive outcome. Because she will go on. Whatever her faith, she cannot abandon what she has begun. She cannot picture herself saying to Fadila: it’s not going to work, let’s drop it.
But there is one thing that is striking. On every site, in every story or analysis, no matter the approach or the method, the initial learning stage consists in showing a few letters and teaching the student to make basic combinations. And nowhere does it say that there are students who fail to assimilate this elementary ABC. The overall implication is that this basic knowledge is accessible to everyone—if there are difficulties, they will come later.
And this is where Édith has come a cropper, faced with such resistance to what is the basic cornerstone of learning. There are individuals to whom one can give an F and an A and who cannot combine them to make either FA or AF.
Édith has read hundreds of pages and nowhere is there any reference to such individuals. Well, there is, indirectly, in the two-fold conclusion that, on the one hand, all too often there are people who give up on their literacy classes—regrettably, since they were the ones who asked to take them; and on the other there are, invariably, programs on offer to the crowds of hopefuls that remain ineffective.
15
When Fadila comes in, her expression is inscrutable.
“Is everything all right?”
“Is no sleeping. Watching television all night. I seeing three programs is Special Correspondent, is shit. Is bullshit all over, everywhere.”
“But when you watch television like that at night aren’t there times when your eyes just start to close by themselves? Don’t you just drop off after a while?”
“Sometimes, yes. But sometimes is no sleeping all night. Is good thing television working. I is all alone. If I switching off television, I seeing things is no good. So I leave switched on. Is not easy being alone.”
The Alphalire method offered online on the French as a foreign language website, lepointdufle, is so well conceived, and playful at the same time, in both its written and oral components, as well as being full of imagery and not just graphic, that Édith describes it enthusiastically to Fadila and suggests they give it a try. On screen they can work without pencil and paper, at least at the start; the student doesn’t have to make the effort to write, only recognize and identify, and compose syllables with a click of the finger; it’s a game.
Fadila is sitting at her usual place, on Édith’s left, at the table where they’ve become accustomed to working. But instead of a sheet of paper, Édith places her little laptop computer between them. She notices at once that Fadila is sitting well back from the table, deep in her chair. She does not lean toward the screen the way she would lean over the paper.
Édith shows her the first of the three hundred and thirty-three exercises, and she does not need to act cheerful: it really is a game.
They start with the five vowels. Each time they click on one of the letters, they hear a woman’s voice saying the letter. The game consists in having the student point the cursor at a letter, then say the name of the letter out loud and, with a click, check whether or not they have given the right answer.
Édith has chosen the capital letters. She emphasizes once again to Fadila that she knows four out of the five vowels. “The fifth one is u, we’ll deal with that one later. Let’s start with the others.” She shows Fadila how to move the cursor across the screen with her fingertip, how to put it on the chosen letter, and then how to click with a slight pressure of her finger to hear the name of the letter. “Go ahead, you’ll see, it’s easy.”
Fadila shakes her head. She is glum. She keeps her back pressed against the chair, her hands on her thighs under the table. “Is computer I no doing,” she says.
“Forget it’s a computer. Just pretend it’s a game. You know how to use a telephone: this is even simpler.”
“I no doing,” says Fadila again. “Is for young people. I’m be too old.”
“Try it! Everyone can do it.”
“I no can seeing on there,” says Fadila, lifting her chin toward the screen. “I no see nothing.”
“How can that be,” says Édith. She points to the letter A. “You see the letter, here. You recognize it, no?”
Fadila goes on shaking her head. “I no can seeing.” A stubborn child.
“Don’t you want to try? Just once?”
The same sign language. No, no, no.
“Would you rather go on like before, with paper?”
“Yes.”
“Fine,” says Édith. “If you prefer. After all, in the old days before computers we didn’t need them to learn how to read.”
She will think about Fadila’s refusal later. For the time being the main thing is to stay cheerful.
She closes the laptop, shoves it to one side, and reaches for the sheets and the felt-tips. On one sheet—comprising their entire fortune—are the words they have already seen:
FADILAAMRANI
NASSERLARBIT
AÏCHA
RER A
RER B
RER C
The time before, when Édith had added AÏCHA to the list of words Fadila knew, she had hoped Fadila would notice the dieresis above the I and ask her what these two dots were for. Now while she goes over the words again one by one, she hopes Fadila will say something about the dieresis. But no questions come.
So Édith points to the dieresis: this sign means anybody can recognize AÏCHA among the other words, she explains.
But apparently, it doesn’t apply to everyone, as the minutes which follow make amply clear. At least not straight off, where Fadila is concerned.
Édith realizes that the problem is precisely that Fadila cannot learn such simple things with her first attempt, and, for lack of an explanation, she now knows that repetition, tedious repetition, will have to be one kind of solution.
She goes back to the letter U. They mustn’t miss the opportunity to learn another letter.
“On the computer you saw that there are four letters you know . . .”
Fadila does not deny it. She does not repeat that she couldn’t see anything on the screen.
While she is speaking, Édith writes A, E, I, O.
“ . . . and there’s one more, a new one, the U.”
Some writing practice. Work on the U. Simplified writing: just a curve, no vertical serif on the right side. Fadila relaxes.
Édith notices that she still doesn’t hold her pen properly.
Suddenly an idea springs to mind: “You know you’ve got nearly all the letters, now.”
She writes the twenty-six letters of the alphabet on two lines and shows them one by one to Fadila. She doesn’t question her. She draws a red circle around each of the letters they have already seen, affirming, “You already know this one very well,” and only then does she ask, “Which one is this?”
Once again she can see there are var
ying degrees in Fadila’s knowledge, and there is a major difference between recognizing and naming. Just because Fatima is familiar with a letter she doesn’t necessarily know how to name it.
Still, they come up with fifteen red circles, fifteen letters that Fadila knows, to varying degrees.
“That’s a lot, out of twenty-six,” says Édith, jubilant.
She rewrites the twenty-six letters on a sheet of paper, and asks Fadila, once she is at home and relaxed, to pick out the ones that are familiar. “You can make a circle around it, or a square. Squares are easy to make.”
She adds the gesture to her words, four lines. This brings back a memory from Luc’s early childhood. The family pediatrician recommended the children undergo a series of tests offered by the Social Security, once they turned two and four.
Luc was four. The psychologist gave him a blank sheet of paper and a pencil: “Can you draw a square for me?” He sat there silent and motionless. Édith assumed he didn’t know how. The woman said again, “Draw a square for me.” So Luc, determined, said: “I’d rather draw a sun.” And without waiting for her green light, he drew a huge sun, with S-shaped sunbeams, filling the entire page.
“It doesn’t matter,” said the psychologist. It really doesn’t, is what Édith would have said.
Two days later she walked by Luc and saw he was drawing, and she asked, “Say, don’t you want to draw a square?” And the little boy, as if he were fed up with all this obsession with squares, immediately drew a square, with four very confident pencil strokes.
Fadila watches as Édith puts away some of the boys’ clothes that are lying around: shoes and trousers into the wardrobe, a parka onto the coatrack, a belt into a drawer. “Is always the mama she picking up everything,” she says, sympathetically.
Édith and Gilles have a friend who has just lost his wife. The children are quite young still. Édith tells Fadila about it. The friend has assured them that everything is fine, he’s gotten organized, but Édith wonders, in concrete terms, how he is getting on with their everyday life.
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