Lesson 1: If you pour boiling water on ants they scream

Entre Les Murs is a frank and colourful novel about the education system in France, narrated by a bored teacher of the French language. He recounts the day to day brouhaha of a classroom of teenagers in a parisien school. The book creates some interesting, if neat, parallels between the way that teachers are shaped by the system in the same way as kids - their way of interacting at staff meetings often echoing their pupils. But perhaps most importantly it looks at the way that the French language is spat out by the kids, the way that it is used outside the grammar books. Of course all this is very interesting for someone studying the French language.

The book bloated me with memories of how much I hated school and also my own early days learning French.

After a couple of months cowering around Paris asking shopkeepers for "un of that" and "une of this", I enrolled in a French class at a community college full of Russians. I would have loved to have engaged in the general comraderie and nattered to them about literature and history. However, here the bridging language had shifted from English to French and as I couldn't speak any French I found myself spluttering around in troubled waters, pulling fish bones and unsightly vowel sounds out of my hair, trembling from cold and fear. It took two lessons for me to remember "school sucks", and I decided that home schooling (so that I didn’t have to make any effort other than open my door) was the way forward for me.

I selected a random "french teacher" from a magazine for english-speakers in Paris.
He was in his forties and smelt like he had been sleeping in his cupboard on a pile of bat dung for the last year. It turns out that he was not really in it for the money, or for that matter to watch a debutante come out into french society and pirouette her way to advanced grammar. No, what he wanted was to improve his English with a "long-haired dictionary" ... and I was an easy target.

After ten minutes of speaking French my brain would become as soft as baby food and when I was in this vulnerable state he would start to feed more and more English words into the conversation until we would be conducting the whole lesson in English. I'd be saying "yeah in French you probably say it differently" and then he'd explain in English how you'd say it in French.

Evidence that he had no idea of my level of French was when, after three lessons, he brought me a gift "for you to practise reading french": The Big Book of Ants – 2,000 pages on everything you need to know about ants (no photos). Not really the kind of thing you offer a beginner to practise french, particularly a beginner who had never expressed any interest in ants, although I certainly was starting to feel antsy about all this wasted time and money.

One fine day I had a personal revolution and deposed this misguided antophile. I decided once again to try leaving my house for lessons and so trekked across town to the home of another random french teacher.

This guy lasted one day. His first error was to make me take my shoes off and replace them with his old slippers. I soon found out the reason for this is that he “likes Japan”. But on further probing I realised that he was just one of those people who likes manga and knows that they have those vending machines in Japan full of used school girl’s underwear and so he has therefore decided he “likes Japan”.

But forcing me to take my shoes off and having no substance weren't his greatest sins. The problem was the biscuits. He’d put a couple of biscuits on the table in an attempt to make his place look welcoming and not like a sex den for students of the french language, but he never offered me one. Oh I didn’t want one - they looked kind of stale and a bit wet - but they were just there and I couldn't take my eyes off them. Just the fact that he didn’t know how to offer biscuits to a guest who was wearing his old slippers made me know I could never go back to him.
Now I have a female french teacher who comes to my place once a week. It’s more of a conversation than a lesson. We have lots of similar interests and we talk like mad women about books and films. The problem is that it is working out so well between us that it is becoming a little embarrassing - I’m starting to feel like I’m paying her to be my friend. Yep, she’s one of my best friends in France and I pay her.

She’s from an older generation and with her I learn old fashioned expressions like Il tombe des cordes, kind of like saying "it's raining cats and dogs" rather than saying "it's raining shit and bricks". She gives me the language of the drawing rooms.