Nicolas Philibert (Director), To Be and To Have (Être et avoir)

A Review

Copyright © Ruth Marshall 2006

We don't often watch movies, but one day recently we were out visiting, and our hostess played a DVD for us. It was a French documentary called To Be and To Have (Être et avoir), about a one-teacher school in rural France. Georges Lopez, the teacher, was within a year of retirement, and as well as being their teacher, he was friend, comforter, peace-maker, and advisor to the children in his care. I know there are differences, but in some ways the situation in a school like this is similar to that of home education.

At the time the film was made, there were twelve children in the school, ranging in age from about 4 to 11; and the teacher had to divide his time between them all. He taught everything from reading, handwriting and counting to the smallest ones – to dictation and more advanced arithmetic to the older children. Some of the children took to academics like ducks to water; some required far more time and patience to understand concepts; some were easily distractible and couldn't sit still...

There were a couple of teaching ideas I found helpful:

For handwriting, the smallest children were given a large sheet of unlined paper and a marker pen (not a pencil – which makes sense, as markers are much easier for small children to control). They held the paper sideways, and the teacher wrote a model word in cursive at the top for them to copy. Then he coached them through writing it for themselves underneath. After that, he took each child's work in turn and showed it to the whole group of 4-year-olds, who had to critique their classmate's work. This was interesting, as it had them looking carefully at letter forms and slopes of letters, training them to see for themselves what each letter should look like. (Several months later, the same children were practising writing numerals between ruled lines on the whiteboard).

Dictation began very early, but very simply – and it covered grammar, spelling and punctuation skills. For the youngest children, it was sentence-building rather than dictation: the teacher gave them a lesson on the difference between the masculine and feminine words for "his/her friend" ("son ami" and "sa amie"), and then each child was given a pile of word cards and had to choose the right ones to make a sentence. There was no physical writing involved – but each one had to produce a sentence which was grammatically correct (and each of them "wrote" different sentences). By the time the children were 10 or 11, they were writing full sentences and paragraphs from dictation, with occasional reminders about verb tenses thrown in, to remind them of the spelling. The teacher always told the children when they were to insert commas or full stops. (I have always been in a dilemma over whether to include punctuation when dictating passages, so personally I found this very helpful!)

There were some wonderful scenes in the documentary, showing the children working and studying in the context of their own homes and families. It was a little disappointing, though, to note the teacher's assumption – both implied and spoken – that as the children grew into adolescence they would inevitably distance themselves from their parents. In fact, there were occasions when he seemed to encourage this, and to have children confide in him rather than in their own fathers and mothers.

Apart from this, and a couple of other minor quibbles, all of my family very much enjoyed To Be and To Have, and we would recommend it as well worth viewing.

For the official movie site, see here: http://chipsquaw.free.fr/etreetavoir/