Petit digression

It must have been in the spring semester before, the teacher for my second semester of French Lit was a Professeur Smith, and what most amused me to learn from him was how to speak French with a totally flat American accent. His accent horrified me, every lecture. I knew it was getting into my brain. It might spoil my properly rolled glottal R's that I had picked up early enough to get them right. I might not know any grammar at all, but pronunciation was a specialty of the conversational method I had learned in high school.

At thirteen I had joined a class that had been meandering through French instruction for three years, taught by the head of the university foreign language department. Every day for an hour, from the moment M. Durette entered the room, only French was spoken. We watched filmstrips and listened to recordings, ecoutez et repetez, listen and repeat, repeat endlessly, in the darkened room, blinds lowered, our metal desk-chair units banked in two rows on each side of the room, and he explained the illuminated pictures, in voluble French. Within a month I had begun to pick up what he was going on about. Le petit train est arretee a la gare. And curiously, I was able to write French from his dictation and spell rather well immediately.

Then after the charismatic M. Durette, I had two years at Whitewater High School with the dynamic Mme Flanagan, as well as six weeks in summer of European travel with a high school group that she chaperoned. What those teachers gave carried me through a long way. But not much past Professeur Smith.