Pion- 1. (nm) pawn,
piece, checker. 2. (nm/nf) person paid to supervise schoolchildren.
I have been working for a few months now as a substitute
teacher in the French primary school I frequented when I was a kid. Originally,
I applied to teach at the high school level, but my services were more useful, it seemed, with the little ones.
I interviewed with the director, a tall, imposing, well
put-together man with impeccably cut white hair, wire-rimmed spectacles, and the occasional ascot. During my interview, I emphasized that I had years of experience teaching adults and university students English, and that ESL and History and French and Theater and Music and
that kind of stuff would be fine, but I just wasn’t sure about Math and Science… He looked
at me, raised an eyebrow, leaned in closer and said: “You realize this is a
Primary School. You should be able to handle it.”
Well. He was wrong.
My first few 7AM calls brought me in to teach second grade, but, as I had surmised, I was somewhat useless at demonstrating the basic concepts of arithmetic to children. It seems that a ukulele and strong leaning towards play acting does not an improvised math teacher make, and I am suspicious that my fallbacks in this department have lessened the gigs lording over classrooms of the truly tiny. It may also have something to do with my
inadvertent destruction of an expensive piece of equipment, a certain
overhead-projected interactive computer screen that looked uncannily like the
whiteboard next to it, but I digress.
Now I am mostly called in to do Yard Duty. I am, as the
French say, a pion.
In the book series Le
Petit Nicolas, there is a famous pion. He is an imposing guy, brilliantly rendered by
Sempé and Goscinny. He is always harrumphing around, googly-eyed, being pranked
and generally inducing hilarity. I think of him often.
In reality, there are six to eight of us on the playground
at any given time. We are not supposed to fraternize, lest we neglect out task
of keeping the children safe. So, when the need for adult interaction becomes unbearable, we have to chat whilst
stealing sideways glances at windows, exits, and each other. There is talk
amongst the Surveillants (that’s what
they call us- the Surveyors) that there is a spy among us, reporting back to the director at all time, but no one is sure. When he occasionally appears, we scatter, we kowtow, we say "Oui Monsieur".
Anyway, being a pion
is kind of awesome. Basically my job is to hand out balls and jump ropes, clean
up scrapes (but not remove splinters, this counts as surgery apparently and I
am not qualified), and tell children not to tattle on each other.
“Noah called me a Lady Gagaface.”
“Well… Are you a Lady Gagaface?”
“No!”
“There you go. Problem solved.”
Because the school goes from nursery to 5th
grade, there is also the odd pre-adolescent murmur. Some of these are highly
dramatic and require meetings with teachers and parents where I must recount
embarrassingly inaccurate anatomical misconceptions, but more often than not
the most challenging part of the job is maintaining a straight face when talking
to a 4th grade boy about the inappropriate aspects of the term
“Little Jigglers”, explaining to a 2nd grader why they should ask
their parents about why a vagina is and yet isn’t “like an inside-out penis”,
and generally discouraging the playing of “butt-tag”.
I am sadly not sure how much longer I can take it, however.
I do love the kiddies. They are alternately adorable
(saying-the-darndest-things, enveloping my legs with brazen hugs,
language-leaping through to bilingualism), and maddening (playing who-can-hit-the-highest-pitch-screech,
insisting they don’t need to go and then sobbing as their pants get wet,
constantly stealing each other’s shoes). But I’m afraid of the side effects.
Yes, I almost scolded a loudly arguing adult couple in front of Whole Foods yesterday.
Yes, I nearly confiscated a tube of lipstick from a teenager in the street this
morning. But what if it goes further? What if, against so many years of Higher
Education and Literature and Music, I am reduced to bitterly harrumphing like a
Goscinny character? What if my lines go two-dimensional and all I can do is rip
exciting things out of children’s hands “Because I said so”? I shudder to think
that once you go pion, you never go
back.
On the plus side though, my paper airplanes are getting WAY
better.
