End of the 2020 School Year

Today is July 4th, Independence Day in the United States. As an American abroad, I hadn’t even realized it was Independence Day, as it is not a holiday here in France. One of the more minor problems of living abroad is that you miss out on your usual holidays, and you don’t have the same habit of celebrating new national holidays in your place of residence.

Before July 4th was Friday, July 3rd, the last day of the tumultuous 2019-2020 school year. When I look back on the school year, I can see that we were luckier than most, in having a mere two months (not including the French Easter holiday of two weeks) cut from the school calendar because of COVID-19. In some states in the US, schools didn’t meet at all for the remainder of the school year once initially suspended in-school classes.

Here, we stopped sending our child to school in the middle of March, but were able to send her back at the beginning of June for two days a week, and then had a full French schedule of four days a week for the final two weeks, until July 3rd. Having our four-year-old Miriam at home during that whole time probably didn’t help to foster her independence, but she grew a lot during the year nevertheless.

In France, there are three years of what Americans might call preschool, which are actually part of the public school system. For the 2017-2018 school year, 97.2% of 3-year-olds were in school in France. Since then, school has become mandatory for 3-year-olds. This first year was a difficult period for our child, as she had to learn to fully communicate in French for the first time. This past year, the second, was much easier, and turned out to be a huge period of growth.

Instead of constantly being worried about school and being away from her mother, we got to see Miriam be happy to go to school in the morning, and more willing to talk about her day once she got home. This is in part thanks to two consecutive years of hard work by great teachers, who take in 30 small children and somehow develop each one during the course of the year. Our teacher was fluent in both English in French, which was a big boost for us, and helped Miriam cope with the separation of her best friend from the previous year, who was in a different class.

So far, our decision to put Miriam in a private French Catholic school has turned out well. Though not specifically Catholic ourselves, Miriam gets the opportunity to learn about Christianity from her teachers and the school priest, and surprises us with how much she knows when she gets home.

She is still a young child, but now she has left infancy behind for good. She does a great job taking care of her younger brother, and is starting to accept our authority as parents. She can understand basic logic and can see that accept that she can be wrong sometimes, and changes her attitude and apologizes accordingly. This is a big step from the stubborn behavior she naturally exhibited in the prior year.

It has been a pleasure to watch her grow up, and we look forward to even bigger changes next year, as she starts the final year of preschool, equivalent to Kindergarten in the United States. It is difficult to believe that all the work we have put in as parents and all the growth we have seen has been in a portio of her life that she may not remember much at all as an adult. And yet, if she can do so much now as she nears her fifth birthday, we can only imagine the development that will come to pass in the years to come.