La bonne

La bonne, or the cleaning lady, has been helping me with my French. He weren't 'alf wrong old Socrates - "the more one learns the less one knows", though I suppose it was someone else who put it so nicely into English. Here's my version - "the more I teach the less I'm sure".

Before the cleaning lady I had addressed my question to a fellow teacher. "What's the translation of rambling in the sense of talking." Having looked in a puzzled fashion at the word I'd found in the dictionary - which apparently meant unstitched, shouldn't trust dictionaries- she found herself at a loss. This is no reflection on her French but more in line with something I've noticed about teaching. Apart from it being thirsty work (I understand now why they are always to be found in pubs) and a great responsibility (think of all the teachers that scared your otherwise blissful childhood, one shouldn't miss an opportunity, it gives purpose to adulthood) it's also a bit difficult.

You have a blackboard (white, in my case, unless I get the manky classroom) and a bit of chalk (or a pen, in my case ) and they stuff you write up there gets written down and revised and remembered (or lost, in my case). But what if you make a mistake, a quite unconscious translation induced mistake. Life the time I taught my chefs that the translation of 'persil' was 'persil'. It was a full ten minutes before I realised I had mixed up parsley with washing powder. What if I hadn't noticed. Imagine the potential 'persil and mixed herb omelets'.

I know that parsley is parsley so why is it that when someone actually counts on me knowing, I think it's persil?

That's what worries me about this blog. Luckily my Grandmother doesn't have a computer or she'd be sending me daily spelling mistake lists. Perhaps I should have lied and told you I'm a French teacher. No, on second thoughts, that too could cause spelling problems.