Hmm. In the year 1912/1913 Flo was working at William Lunn School in Griffintown. She was living a 'new woman' experiment, living four girls to a flat on Hutchison.
Her boffo sister Marion, already a teacher at Royal Arthur in Little Burgundy, had engineered the experiment. She loathed living in rooming houses, as the matrons bossed her around like a little girl. (They had to make sure their charges were chaste as they could be accused of running a bawdy house.)
My story Threshold Girl at www.tighsolas.ca/page10.pdf.pdf is about her year at Macdonald Teachers College, in 1911/1912. It's based on her letters home.
Flora almost didn't get into the school. She failed French in her final year at St. Francis High School in Richmond. But the local minister pulled some strings and she got in anyway. You see, in those days, an aspiring college student had to get a clean bill of moral health (so to speak) from his/her minister to enter Macdonald and probably McGill. And being a 'good girl' trumped being not very good at languages.
From what I can see from my extensive research, many new teachers were graduating without good French, and then they became the teachers themselves, of French. Which is why anglos didn't learn French, properly.
This was kind of a cause celebre in the English School System in Quebec in and around 1920. They were intent on rectifying it.
And still in the 60's, we were taught French by ill-equipped anglophones. It didn't matter then. If you could sputter out a few words in French, as in "je suis bilingue' you got by, until the 70's and the Parti Quebecois got in changing 'les regles du jeu."
Most of my classmates hit the 401 and went on to truly brilliant careers in Ontario and other parts, because in general the English education system in Quebec was exemplary. There's a lot of truth to the remark "the Parti Quebecois made Toronto."
Some of us stayed and languished, for the most part.
Especially anyone wanting to work in English media.
Poor Flo, I have a tape she made for a niece in 1970 and she's still learning French. She's a retired teacher by this time.
Edith, I assume, had decent French. Why? Because she taught at a French Private School in 1911/12. French Methodiste.
Marion married a French man, Mr. Blair from Three Rivers.
And here I am with a French Canadian mother, a well-educated perfectly bilingual mother, who did not speak to us in French as children, except to curse and yell. She sent my elder brother to French Nursery School, oddly enough.
I'm a English writer, but all communications jobs in Quebec ask for the candidate to be bilingual.
Every once in a while I've tried to 'up' my French, but to no avail. Seems that I have so many ingrained bad habits, I can't undo them.
(For some reason I ace the subjonctif but can't get the order of pronouns right.) But I do listen to Zola and Flaubert on Litterature Audio. And French songs on the satellite, Piaf, Aznavour. It's too late for me to get a good job, but I am trying to stave off Alheimer's.
There are some people who can hold a conversation in a second language, but don't know the language deeply. Well, I know French fairly deeply, but can't converse well. That's because I always try to translate what I want to say from English to French. Instead of sticking to simple French phrases.
My kids were in French Immersion, but frankly they are no more bilingual than I was... and I fear this course held them back academically. There were no textbooks designed for French Immersion so they used texts written for French children and their teachers had to dumb them down. Dumbing down geography and science wasn't my idea of an education.
They did OK, but frankly that was thanks to me.
Here's the irony: I found a document online from about 1870, or so, from whatever body oversaw English Education in Quebec and it was written YOU CANNOT LEARN LANGUAGE IN A CLASSROOM.. and it was underlined.
One of my eldest son's French teachers (a Francophone) began the school year saying about the same thing to his class: I can't teach you French the way they way they want me to teach."
Well, with the new technologies, there's no excuse not to practice a language. For instance, you can take your favorite movie, the one you know by heart, and put in French subtitles, dubbing or both.
You can download the complete works of Felix Leclerc off iTunes.
It's still very hard to find grammar exercises online, everyone wants to make money. But I found OLD exercise books on Archive.org. Renouf. The books Flora learned from.... I think the Renoufs were actually from Richmond, indeed, next door neighbours to the Nicholsons at the turn of the last century.
In my day, there was only Chez Helene, or watching B movies dubbed into French. The problem: they were unintelligible, everyone spoke too fast.... because French is a longer language than English and they just translated the dialogue verbatim no matter how stupid it looked lip sync wise.. Now they are more careful, paraphrasing to make the French words fit into the mouth flaps.. (So a dubber told me. That's the term, mouth flaps.)
The movies had other charms: they were often sword and sandals epics... lots of horses and muscular men in leather.
