Maxime

One of my greatest accomplishments in China, in teaching, and possibly in life, was teaching Maxime to speak English.

The first half of my first year in China was rough. In addition to the anorectic phase, there was a severe learning curve in figuring out how to teach. I had fourth, ninth, and tenth through twelfth grades, and my fourth graders were the “B” group, so they were more like second-grade-level English speakers. I spent almost all of my class time on classroom management.

Maxime, the French student I was assigned to tutor, was no exception. I spent much more time than necessary trying to get this wiggly nine-year-old to sit still and read a book aloud during the first half of the year, and he resented me for it. He was in a class of his own, literally, in a small room at the back of the school library, and was also learning subjects from French-national teachers, and Chinese from a Chinese teacher. I taught him twice a week at 8 a.m.

At some point, likely around the same time I began to understand what Chinese people were saying, I began to sense that there was a better way.

So when I came back from Spring Festival holiday and a somewhat traumatic conference-vacation in Thailand, I threw out the books.

(I mean, not literally. I love books.)

I had my fourth-graders put away their texts. I had the ninth-graders forget about business English. I tossed the curriculum I had created for the high schoolers. And I asked Maxime to tell me a story.

Fourth grade became a set of weekly units structured around occupations (and relevant vocabulary), with an activity mid-week and a quiz on Fridays. Ninth grade became a series of discussions on American culture, and later a furniture-making art class. High school became a bunch of independent studies.

Maxime’s story became an adventure.

When I asked him to tell me a story, Maxime began immediately to describe a hero – himself – warding off first a thief (who tried to steal his bow), and shooting a wolf. The story was about a paragraph long. But we could work with that, I thought.

And we did work with it. We typed it up, then looked at published plays for formatting. We talked about a cast of characters and wrote a dramatis personae. We wrote dialogue. We perfected his scenario. Then we got to work on production.

Everything we built was made up of a combination of string, tape, paperboard and bamboo, which we sawed down ourselves. (I broke two saws.) My teacher’s office became a forest of real bamboo stalks, stripped of their leaves, and drawn bushes – half drawn by Maxime, who took them home for homework, and half by me – and a paperboard “thief’s house” from which the offender would creep in the attempt to steal the bow. (I suggested that we write “Thief’s House” on the house, but Maxime wisely explained that no, we shouldn’t, “because you don’t know who is a thief. They look normal,” and then proceeded to draw an alarm box on the front door – showing another keen insight into thief mindset, I feel.)

We made a bow and several arrows, and practiced with them during class time. We assembled costumes for the characters, including a farmer’s hat for Maxime-the-hero, and a mask for the soon-to-be-slain wolf. We cast the parts.

We were almost ready to present Maxime’s play, which would be done in the library during a break and to a very small crowd, when Maxime came in one day and announced that his grandmother was coming from France. She wanted to see the play. She would arrive in two weeks.

So we came up with two more weeks of activities: We wrote up cast bios and got photos of each cast member, and mounted them on a foam-board. We wrote up a description of the play. We rehearsed. We watched Shrek II. (That last one was a reward for all the hard work.)

When play-day came, Maxime was all aflutter. He hopped around the library and chastised the boy he had cast as the thief, for goofing off. He solemnly greeted his father, mother and grandmother as they came and took their seats in child-sized library chairs. He prepared himself for his debut.

The play went very well. After being duped by the thief, Maxime recovered his bow and shot his arrow straight and true, almost into the wolf’s – that is, his French teacher’s – eye, then swiftly dispatched the wolf carcass with a cardboard knife. When the play was over, the three cast members stepped on stage to take a bow.

Later, Maxime’s father asked “Is that it?” The play had taken almost exactly two minutes.

I handed him a copy of the typed-up script, all of one page, and described some of the work we had done to produce this completely original performance. I described how Maxime had been taciturn and unwilling to respond when we first started the project, and how now his face lit up and he cavorted around the classroom, library, and school grounds cheerfully chattering away – in English – and imitating funny things he had seen in Shrek II.

“I just wanted him to be able to dare,” his father said. “I want him, if we’re on a plane, to ask for apple juice.”

And that is what he learned.