Madame Touissant my French teacher. I was 11 when she became my teacher. It was in a new private school that required you to take a foreign language, but which language you took was entirely up to you. There were several choices. I had not considered French. The easier route would have been continuing Spanish. I had a lot of past experience with Spanish and had been taking it since first grade. However, my mom insisted that French was the more beautiful language and that the family was planning a vacation to France next summer, so she told me to take French instead because it would be more useful. I wanted to make my family happy and proud so I did what I was asked without question.
I deeply regret this decision because all of the other instructors were fine by most reports but the French teacher turned out be unbelievably psychologically abusive and had to have been mentally-unstable.
It was a fancy smancy private school that I was never fully comfortable in, and my French teacher was always bragging about all that she had, her mansions, her olympic swimming pool and maids and how she washed her skin daily in not mere tap water but bottles of evian. It was so unnecesary. She was eager to make everyone disclose what they had, how much their parents made and how big their house was. I didn't have a big home, there were others who didn't also, some of us were there just because of hard work and scholarships, not everyone was a millionaire.
Madame Touissant wore entirely too much makeup. Her face was just caked in powder that mafe her look like she had escaped the French revolution era, foundation easily four shades lighter than her complexion. It was kinda startling to behold. She was also extremely tall like 6 ft, and even more imposing in her pant suits and long pointed heels as she marched up and down the classroom.
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Everyday we discussed the answers to the previous day's homework and tests, but she never praised you for what you did right. If you got anything wrong then may God have mercy on your soul. She would order you up to front of the class and just scream herself hoarse, stop lessons for maybe a good fifteen minutes just to ridicule you in front of the entire classroom. I never cried, but plenty of other students were left in tears. It's really a shame that there were no cameras in that classroom because what she was doing was wrong. When other adults were there she put on a great show, acted warm and bubbly, waving and blowing kisses and for a moment you almost believed she loved her students.
In private she was quick to tell me what what was wrong with the way I looked, how bad my skin was and grab me by the hair and pick on me and tell me that I smelled. It was like having Hatsumono from Memoirs of a Geisha as your professor. Other classmates said that I needed to report her, she would treat any student badly, but it was obvious to everyone that I was getting treated the worst. I don't bdlieve that it would have made a difference, it would have been my word against hers and shortly we will come to a situation that will demonstrate how powerless I really was to do much.
Madame would get into these money schemes. For instance there was a program that was supposed to help connect us to penpals in different parts of the francophone world. We were encouraged to participate for a small fee to have a native French-speaker to practice French with. Well, everyone in the class sent in money in care of dear Madame, but not a single one of us ever received a letter from a pen pal in return. We kept asking her what was going on and she kept saying that she would look into it. Meanwhile we never saw our money again.
She went to my mom and volunteered to tutor me after school in French for a small fee of course, there were lots of tests coming up, we were drilled weekly and sometimes daily so it seemed like a good idea to my mom. My mom paid her hundreds of dollars. This was against the school policy and possibly against the law. As my teacher she was not supposed to try to make money off of study sesions, this was naturally part of her job responsibilities to give as much of her time as any student or parent requested.
When I mentioned this to a guidance counselor in passing, she was horrified and reported Madame because she was not supposed to go around shaking down parents. Madame was crafty however, and ran to my mother with tears in her eyes, begging forgiveness, proclaiming that she didn't know she was doing anything wrong, and that she was so very confused about American laws. She said that she was going to lose her job if she did not save her, and she had a family with children and was at the end of her rope.
My mother is a very kind and trusting person who cannot read predatory behavior, and unfortunately her sob story worked. My mom covered for her, and pretended that she had not been forced to pay anything and that I must have been just confused about what was going on being an innocent child. It really still hurt not to have my own mom back me up about something she knew to be true. My mom just kept saying, "But she could have lost her job!" Well, then she shouldn't have engaged in these kinds of practices then if she values her job.
I was disciplined by the administration because it appeared that I had invented this story. Now nobody in the school would believe any of the things I said. The emotional abuse started racheting up because Madame who blamed me for exposing what she was doing
She lowered my grades in retaliation. I took this class because I was encouraged by my family to do so with the plan to spend the summer in France soon. Since my GPA had fallen ironically due the class I needed to take a summer class to get my grades back up to keep the average necessary for the financial aid. So I couldn't actually go to France and had to be left behind since the trip was all paid for. The dark comedic twist is that I went through all of this pain for nothing in return.
On one ocassion I made the disastrous mistake of leaving my homework in a locker. The thought of going to her class made me so nervous and sick to my stomach that I was becoming forgetful. I asked permission to go to my locker to retrieve it and she hit the roof. We went to the locker together alright. She trashed the space completely. She threw open the door and turned all off the contents of the locker upside down, she threw my books on the ground, grabbed my backpack and poured everything onto the floor my pencils, erasers,my papers, folders, art supplies. Then she grabbed my binder and yanked every page out in it one by one, including assignments from other classes. She tore it up into little pieces in front of me and literally started throwing the books at me. Last but not least my science project was in the locker. We had to collect insects we found, identify them and label them. She took this container filled with moths, crickets and other bugs and dumped that onto me aa little girl, then left me to clean up her mess. I truly believe that this woman was mad.
Another girl in my grade was thinking of taking French and got approval from the administration to sit in on Madame's class for a day. Cate witnessed all of this and was so scared by what she saw that this was the end of any aspirations to learn French, suddenly she took a great interest in learning Latin instead.
I asked to be transferred out of that place into just a regular public school, I was on the verge of mental collapse. I was overworked-- the days were 7 am to 5 pm, the kids were mostly snobs, I had no friends and I was even sent to a shrink because nobody was believed me and was thought to be a liar or delusion. The one bit of good luck I had was the child psychiatriast I was taken to was very kind. Rather than pump me full of some pills he thought I was credible, he didn't see any mental problems and recommended that my mother remove me from this school which he viewed as an abusive envnronment. She did so right away and I was sent to an average joe local school down the street and my mood instantly improved. It was a happy environment and I had a nice French teacher this time, Ms Hefner, who was essentially a Franch Drescher lookalike and sported a fun personality that fit the nanny. **** Madame Touissant.
I had not thought about the lunatic teacher in many years, and thought that I could easily answe this question. But it was not so easy once I started writing and remembering her in detail, and I actually really sad, a sadness that stays with me. The shame, humiliation, amger and feelings of powerlessness all came back to me writing this, and that is not the legacy that any should wish to leave their students. I never wanted anything to do with French again once I became an adult. I had a friend who knew I had taken French for some years and wanted me to help them out in their spare time since they were trying to learn traveler's French. I could not do it. It made me too sad.
Madame you are the anti-teacher, this is the opposite of learning.
