griffonnage

Last week, I helped a second-grade class create New Year's cards for their British correspondents. Once we finished brainstorming together on what could be said and drawn on the cards, the children began to copy down the scattering of vocabulary words I had written on the board.

As soon as everyone had taken out their notebooks and dug through their pencil cases for the perfect writing utensil, a hand flew up.

"Dan-ee-kah!” the child projected, “Quelle est la lettre après le ‘e’?” Demanding to know which ‘e’ he was speaking of, the little boy jumped up to the board and pointed to the word ‘New.’ I explained that it is a ‘w’ after the 'e' and the boy nodded in agreement as he walked back to his desk.

Two seconds later, a little girl tapped my elbow. “Dan-ee-kah, comment écrire le mot 'chocolat'?” Correcting her that it was 'chocolate' in English, I pointed her attention towards the board. At this time, the girl next to her asked me what was that long line in the middle of the same word. Was it the number one? Or a fancy dash? Confounded, I quickly solved the problem by walking up to the board and looping the ‘l’ so it resembled its cursive counterpart.

Immediately following this action, a swarm of small children came up to me and started to ask me questions about my autography. Some of them were the same questions I had previously answered. Others were more complicated, such as how to write a capital 'H' in cursive. I shook my head in shame to say that I didn’t really know, elucidating in French that I grew up learning a different system of cursive writing than they did. Although they were absolutely fascinated to discover that there are other types of penmanship, it distracted them from the original lesson on New Year’s greetings. Then it finally came to my attention: I really ought to learn the French style of writing.

So I sought out an écriture exercise book made for early elementary school children. There were plenty to choose from in various sizes, styles, and focuses. I eventually chose one featuring le Petit Nicolas – a famous puerile French cartoon character – simply because it was adorable and inexpensive. It must be understood that children in France immediately start writing in cursive in the kindergarten and elementary levels. Reading through the introduction, I found out that children are actually first introduced to the lower-case script before they tackle the upper-case letters. (This would be why a second-grader would still be unfamiliar with the capital ‘H’.)

The book is organized by different “profiles” of letters as opposed to alphabetical order, explaining that certain letters share similar characteristics. I went through and copied the different letters to get a sense of what French cursive was like. In general, the lowercase letters are mostly identical to what I am habituated to. The uppercase letters are a different story, tripping me up on various curlicues and extraneous loops. And to my discovery, the H indeed is especially challenging.

But after some practice, I've started to get the hang of things. Taking me back to the days of penmanship lessons in that dingy 3rd grade classroom at Noah Webster Christian School, I recall the frustration of patience and control necessary to produce a legible and neat line of writing. Although it still has a bit of a juvenile quality, I've at least been able to properly crank out my name in French cursive (line 4), under what I would call my versions of ridiculous kindergarten print (line 1), normal print (line 2), and normal cursive (line 3).

There is still work that needs to be done, but I am a step closer to getting the French all figured out. Yet knowing that a complete understanding of the French is an impossibility, at least I will no longer be pestered by my kids about what is written on the board.