Where Do Your Parents Work

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Where Do Your Parents Work: Every two weeks, one half of my French GCSE class would offer up a collective moan to the four winds as those rose from their seats to face the dreaded French oral teacher. You'd tell her your name a thousand times but she'd still insist upon calling you Luke. Of course, not all French oral teachers are alike but I always got the sense that the majority of my class would rather have had double maths than endure fifty minutes of the dreaded French oral teacher.

Given that I am currently trying to learn as many languages as possible in just 1 year, you'd be forgiven for thinking I must have been a bit of a swot in my FrenchGCSE class. Surely, I was the pupil who could count to 100 in French in record time and produce an hour long speech on the latest developments in French art. Well, not exactly...

As a class, we worked together. When the teacher asked us to describe the local cinema, we'd simply answer "Bof" (so, so) and that would be the end of the matter. And another trick we learnt was to pretend that each one of our fathers worked in a bank. We'd all worked out how to say that our father worked in a bank and- even if he was actually a painter or decorator or a highly respected patent agent and attorney- we all colluded in the great pretence that our father worked in the local bank. The French oral teacher- not yet wise to ourmalevolence- assumed that the local bank only employed local people or else was the largest bank on the face of the earth.

The one week and one day challenges are coming up very soon and perhaps it really is time for me to learn how to say what my Dad really does for a living in French.

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