This semester, I took a French class at Wellesley for AHS! The class was called Fictions of Childhood in Nineteenth-Century France. It ended up being a really small class (5 students!), and we covered a really wide range of material, from medical reports to fairy tales. We also wrote, illustrated, and bound our own children's books.
The class started with 18th and 19th century philosophy on childhood, particularly on education. This was the first time we read Rousseau (we got back to him at the end of the class); we read Emile, in which Rousseau tells stories of children he's taught and how he would ideally teach a child. We read Doctor Itard's reports about educating Victor, a child found in the forest, and we read the piece by Ranciere that prompted this post about teaching philosophy.
From there we moved to literature for and about children. We started with two fairy tales by Perrault, Little Red Riding Hood and Le Petit Poucet, because, despite being outside of the century on which we were focusing, they're really necessary background for everything later. There were echoes of Little Red Riding Hood meeting the wolf or the cannibal ogres Le Petit Poucet defeats in most of the stories we read, including Les Miserables. I read a bunch of fairy tales in French growing up, but I'd never actually read Perrault's versions, so this was fun. We also got to go to Wellesley's special collections library and look at some illustrated books of fairy tales from the 18th and 19th centuries, which was pretty cool.
We read stories written in the late 1700s and 1800s for children by several different authors, and all of them had pretty obvious morals. They were meant for children of the nobility or (in the 1800s) the bourgeoisie. My favorite book was the one that is still read by French kids in school now: Les malheurs de Sophie by the Comtesse de Segur. Sophie is four years old (though she seems a bit older) and gets into all kinds of sometimes entertaining, sometimes horrifying mishaps.
All of this in some ways built up to Les Miserables. We didn't read all of it, just some of the sections that had the most to do with children. All the concepts that had come up through the rest of the course, like toys, education, independence, humanity vs. animality, charity, and family, came up again.
We finished the class by reading portions of authors' autobiographies that dealt with their childhoods. This was the part of the course that was the least connected to the rest, but a lot of the same themes still came up. This was also when we got back to Rousseau. In Confessions, he was one of the first authors to really write about childhood in autobiographies.
I thought Pauline, the professor, chose the order of readings really well. They were meant to build up, and they did. The same themes came up again and again, and we built up context for our thoughts on those themes from so many angles. We did some intro readings (before Emile) for the course that I didn't mention, and those were the first time we talked about independence and dependence, and then ideas about children's independence showed up so much that I ended up writing my first two essays out of three on independence. Similarly, my second two essays were both related to children in the forest versus in the town/city.
During the second half or so of the course, Pauline had us start a lot of class periods by each putting themes/thoughts from the reading up on the board. A couple of people did this in outline form; I was one of the people who usually did more of a concept map. (Thanks, UOCD.) I thought this was a really good way to make sure we were thinking about the reading even before class started, and the themes we focused on did a good job of prompting discussion. What we talked about probably wasn't all that different than what Pauline would have had us discuss if she'd come up with the topics, but having it come from us was good.
I do wish there had been more of a speaking component to the course. That seems like an odd thing to say, considering that most of each class period was discussion, and we only spoke in French, but discussion doesn't vary all that much in the form and vocabulary needed, and we never really were in a situation where the quality of our spoken French was important. We each did one presentation and then led a discussion, but if we could be understood without much trouble, how well we spoke barely factored into the grade. We also did an exercise at the end of the class in which we each presented the books we'd made, gave each other comments, and then presented them again a couple of days later. The focus there was more on how to do public speaking and how to "sell" the books than on the quality of the French, but since those were rehearsed, we all spoke better French than normal. When we wrote essays, our written French was actually important, so the lack of speaking emphasis felt odd.
I liked a lot of the special things we did in this class - going to Special Collections, making the book, going to the Book Arts Lab. I didn't even know about Special Collections or the Book Arts Lab before this course, and they're some of the coolest parts of the Wellesley library. I also loved having a tiny class; despite barely interacting outside of class, we got to know each other pretty well.
My original reasons for taking this class were that I didn't get into MatSci and so decided to take an AHS, and this was the most interesting AHS that fit my schedule. I wasn't sure what to expect, and I was never particularly good at explaining the course. It got me to think a lot about education, though, which I liked, and without this course I would have never read a lot of the texts we studied, and I enjoyed them. Pauline was incredibly patient and helpful as a prof. I'm really glad I took this class, and I'm definitely more confident in my French again.
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