Les anciens profs écrivent
The steps, the steps...
Rob GRAY
- Les 142 marches pour accéder au lycée de Sèvres
How many were there ? 142 was it ?
If nothing else, Sèvres kept you relatively fit, constantly dashing from troisième to terminale and back down to the CIEP. And to the physical challenge of racing up the daunting steps, or through the bending tunnel, were added the mental gymnastics of coping with two different establishments and two very different sets of administrators. Well, more than two, actually. There were also the staff of the CIEP, the parents and the conseils, each with their thirst, polite but unquenchable, for facts, figures and plans for the future.
In retrospect, my four years at Sèvres sometimes concertina into an unending round of meetings, meals, conseils de classe, parents’ committees on Monday evenings, livrets scolaires and the like, punctuated by courteous clashes with M Gérard Reynier (was it ?) of the Collège, whose first words to me set the tone for our cagey collaboration : “C’est moi le chef d’établissement”. And if M Reynier was one of my first delights of French bureaucracy, I discovered plenty of others when my son Harry was born.
But not all the hurry was unpleasant. There were hasty evenings in Paris, madcap drives to St Germain for the Jury du bac and the dubious excitements of rattrapage, OIB meetings in Lyon, Geneva, Strasbourg and Lyon, the sleep-free London trips, and the Normandy revision weekends. Life, it sometimes seems, was always lived at a hectic pace.
My time at Sèvres, however, boils down to something much more than confused and dizzying movement. One evening in my third or fourth year, I was invited down to the abandoned underground stone quarries beneath Meudon. Two Sèvres alumni, Sylvain Vanston and his brother, equipped with professional miners’ helmets, maps and impressive torches took me to a dark private garden where a forgotten shaft led down to the immense and apparently interminable galleries left by the manic quarrying of the stone used to build nineteenth-century Paris.
Stretching for miles under Meudon and adjacent communes is a huge system of silent and regular caverns, visited only by experts from some government department and, at that time at least, Sèvres students. Winding through pale tunnels and cathedral-like spaces, we finally arrived at “the beach”, an intimate man-made cave with a sandy floor peopled by students doing what I suspected they shouldn’t. I soon made my excuses and left - but the secret underground order of the quarries seems now a vague embodiment of Sèvres and a buried life underlying the surface chaos.
For me it was a place of intense friendships : I’ve never worked with better colleagues than Paddy, Petra and Vicky or taught better students than my final classe t - nor have I ever met such supportive parents.
And because of these intense human relationships it was a place of intense learning and intense shared experience where almost everything had a profound even subterranean sense to it. Students and teachers were both part of and quite apart from the Collège, the Lycée and even France. English - and no doubt the same thing was true for German - was the language of some sort of complicit resistance to a dominant culture we both revered and despised. It was not just a matter of the ingenious and admirable concept of international sections but rather of a special Sèvres spirit of separateness and différence - a différence which made us appreciate the excellences of France and l’éducation nationale but which, at the same time, criticized them and compensated for their failings.
I often wonder why I left.
Dernière modification le 23-11-08 par
