(For privacy reasons, no real names have been used.)
A short train ride away from the small French town I’m studying in, there lives a family on a farm. Once a week, I meet with their chipper twelve-year-old daughter at the train station and we take the train to her neighbourhood. One of her parents comes to pick us up and drives us to their house. I spend an hour with their youngest first, an eager seven-year-old girl, and then an hour with their playful ten-year-old boy, before we all sit down for dinner together.
I’ve been working as an English tutor and a de facto babysitter for them since January of this year. As far as part-time jobs go, I can definitely think of worse things to do than chatting with children for three hours and getting a free meal before being sent back home. Most of the time, it doesn’t even feel like work. My main job is making sure the two youngest kids talk the entire time—they’re already leagues above their peers at school, but their parents want me to make sure they don’t lose whatever English they have. But kids don’t like to be taught knowing they’re being taught. It’s harder than you’d think to ‘teach’ kids while making sure they don’t feel like they’re being lectured at.
I can’t lie and say I didn’t find it slightly difficult to find things to talk about during those first few weeks. These days, I’m used to connecting with new people by way of dropping in pop culture references and singers that I’m a fan of in casual conversation to see if we have a common interest. These kids have seen only a couple of Disney movies, and they’re fairly uninterested in them beyond acknowledging that they have seen them and vaguely recalling the plot. I have since gotten the hang of it, though: I know what will get them talking, and I know how to get them to keep talking.
Their eldest, Madeline, can be trusted to maintain a steady stream of chatter once I settle on the train seat across from her and ask her how her day has been. I think it helps that she perhaps sees me as her peer despite being ten years apart because she tells me all of the gossip about what’s going on with her friends and her teachers. In the first few months after I started working for this family, I worried about exhausting all of the questions and conversation prompts I had for her. After all, there are only so many things you can ask about once you’ve already talked ambitions and dreams and hobbies to death. But I needn’t have worried: nothing gets a twelve-year-old going more than the woes and troubles of other twelve-year-olds.
Louise, the youngest, is no different, though I’ve only just realised this last week. She isn’t as fluent in English as her elder siblings—she still suffers from basic grammatical mistakes and often takes long pauses to find the right words before ultimately giving up with a, “So, yeah,” or resorting directly to French. While I’m meant to keep her talking, the games she has us play typically have us making non-intelligible sounds that are neither English nor French or being completely silent. (It’s par for the course, though, for a seven-year-old girl to want to do nothing but crawl around and meow, so I can’t fault her for it.) But last week, while cutting out paper hearts and fiddling with paintbrushes, I asked her about her day at school, and instead of shrugging me off, she launched into a dramatic story about being shunned by her friends at lunch. Perhaps it was that she was mindlessly painting a cat, something she’d done many times in my presence, no doubt far more when I wasn’t there. Perhaps it was because the story was one she had an emotional, vested interest in. But whatever it was, it was the most fluent I had ever heard her speak, and she hadn’t made a single mistake.
The ten-year-old boy, Simon, doesn’t need much prompting to talk. He’s extremely fascinated by physics and experiments, but despite my prodding, he doesn’t find his classes all that interesting to talk about. What he will talk at length about is whatever contraption he’s just made. He’s got an inquisitive, inventive, and eager nature, and spends a fair bit of his time in the makeshift woodworking shed beside the house. He had made maracas for his mother’s birthday and a music box for his father’s, all entirely out of wood. Last week, he made a working slingshot fashioned like a gun. As he took me through the mechanics of how it worked, I offered words like gear and spring and magnet so that he could explain himself better, and I didn’t even have to pretend I found it interesting, because I did.
Perhaps the most remarkable thing about them is the fact that neither one of them owns a screen. Of course, the parents do, and they have a private, communal computer at home if the kids need to use the internet for school. Their eldest has a tablet issued by her school and a flip phone in order to message her parents when she catches her train. But other than that, they are completely technology-free. They don’t even have a television in their house.
I once asked Madeline if she ever felt left behind or excluded for not having a smartphone like all of her friends do. She hadn’t even hesitated. “No, I don’t.”
She told me she understood why her parents wouldn’t give them screens, liked it even. “I see what it does to my friends. I much prefer going outside and being with my donkey.”
While I spent a good part of my childhood playing outside and making up games with my friends, as technology evolved around me, I evolved around it too. And while I love the idea of shielding young, impressionable children from the malicious nature of technology and the internet, with how essential it’s become these days, raising children without screens seemed unfathomable to me. Of course, now that I’ve seen how creative and independent children can be when they’re not itching for a screen to distract themselves, it doesn’t seem unfathomable at all.
What you’ll have instead are the kind of children you would have a better chance of finding in a storybook or a movie from the ‘50s. You’ll have a family who gets a donkey to do farmwork and children who take it out for walks along the edge of the woods. You’ll have children who spend their afternoons after school gardening or woodworking or climbing trees or jumping on the neighbour’s trampoline. Children who play classical music on vinyl while playing board games. Who get moody when they lose, but when I deliberately let them win, they make fun of me for losing. You’ll get moments like last week when the father stopped my lesson halfway through because one of the children had seen a fox outside and he wanted his son to have a chance to see it too.
What surprised me the most, though, wasn’t the fact that I sometimes felt like a hijabi Maria to French Von Trapp children, but the way they expressed themselves. It’s interesting to see which words their parents have deemed most important to learn and use, which words they favour, and how they have translated certain words from French.
The first time I ever met them, after an hour of playing card games and getting to know each other, Louise looked at me and said, “You are so kind.”
I was rendered completely speechless. We had only known each other for an hour. I was a stranger in her house, someone she hardly knew; and yet, she had said it so matter-of-factly, not expecting me to respond or refute it. You are so kind, she said, as if it was a verbalised thought meant only for her. I was used to being called friendly and likeable. I was used to being called nice. Nobody had ever prepared me for kind.
When I came back to myself half a second later, it was to smile at her and say, “I think you’re kind, too.”
I keep coming back to that interaction, even now, ten months later. One of the reasons why it sticks out in my mind is because I so rarely hear the word kind being said aloud, especially in casual conversation. “You’re so nice”, is what people often tell you. He was a nice guy. She’s really nice. Kind implies something entirely different. Kind implies being better than nice. It’s a word you see in writing, in fairytales, in Disney movies. Once upon a time, in a faraway land of magic and dragons, there lived a princess who was kind…
It soon became apparent to me, though, that kind is simply another word in their vocabulary. Everything and everyone is kind, to them. Whenever the kids squabble, their mother would chide them with a sharp, That’s an unkind thing to say. Louise would complain and wail about Simon purposely riling her up, claiming he was not being kind. The first week after they had gotten the donkey, Madeline earnestly told me that he was still shy but he was very kind.
Kind doesn’t hold the same weight to them the way it does for us. Or maybe it does, and they’re just braver to use it. It intrigues me, the words they choose to say. The word they love to use the most, apart from kind, ironically, is annoying. Unsurprisingly, Madeline is the one who uses it the most.
It’s so annoying, that the history teacher won’t let her class out on time and always makes her almost miss her train home. It’s so annoying, that since it gets dark earlier, she can’t spend as much time with the donkey as she’d like. It’s so annoying, that she has to keep repeating the same songs for her piano class even though she’s already mastered them. It seemed that annoying was a catch-all word to mean all sorts of things.
Best friend is another word they often say. The donkey gets the best friend title, as does their elderly neighbour and the ant farm and friends at school and their parents. Miraculously, so do I. They’ll help set up the table, and they’ll usher me to my designated seat by saying, “This is for my best friend, Sofea.” I know it’s not entirely a French thing but rather a kid thing. Best friend is better than friend, isn’t it? It doesn’t matter that I only meet them once a week for three hours at a time. I am their best friend for those three hours, and they are mine.
Although I’m the one hired to teach them, it’s a predictable cliché then that I end up learning things from them, too. I now know that I hate olives. I know that despite hating olives, I can eat every single one of them if I’m around kids who are eating the same thing, unfazed. I know what it sounds like when a donkey is in mourning. I know how to tell which cherries are ripe to pick. I know how to skip pebbles on a lake.
I don’t think it’s fair for me to expect results this soon into teaching them, though. I don’t even know what kind of results I’m expecting. I’m not exactly expecting any of them to burst into a fully spontaneous tangent in perfect, faultless English any time soon. I’m going to be leaving them next year anyway when I graduate. I’ll just be a brief, year-and-a-half-long blimp in their long, interesting lives. But still, I can’t help but want to see something of myself in them, that I’ve actually made an impact on their lives somehow.
A few weeks ago, Simon shuffled a deck of cards before a game of Guess Who? and he looked up to tell me, cheekily, “Look, I’m shuffling like you.”
Perhaps it’s a selfish desire, to want him to remember that I’d taught him how to shuffle cards, to want him to shuffle it in that way, like me, for the rest of his life, to be asked about it one day and to say, Oh, my babysitter when I was younger taught me how to do it.
Perhaps when they see a batik painting, they’ll remember that time I brought them batik paintings from Malaysia and how we painted them in the sun. Perhaps when they see the colour pink, they’ll think of my perpetual rotation of pink hijabs. Perhaps when they eat salmon, they’ll think of our weekly dinners, and the various, increasingly creative ways their parents included salmon into our meals.
And perhaps when I meet someone new, I’ll remember to tell them that they’re kind.