Summary Of Me Talk Pretty One Day By David Sedaris

Non-fiction essay

The essay “Me talk pretty one day” by David Sedaris from 2005 is an essay on the subject of learning a foreign language. The essay is centred on Sedaris’s personal experience of attempting to learn French, and the trouble that came with it, as he was cursed with a teacher whose idea of an educational environment included draconian punishments for even the smallest mistake, personal attacks, and even the occasional bit of physical harm. Seems this teacher believes mistakes will disappear if her students fear making them in the first place. After all if making a mistake results in you getting a pencil stuffed in your eye you would probably avoid making mistake, or at least I should think so.

The essay is about the experience of Sedaris as a 41-year old English native speaker attempting to learn French in Paris, after a month long French course in New York. Once classes start the students learns that his teacher teaches in a rather cruel manner. From the very beginning the seemingly ma-levolent teacher criticizes and berates even the smallest mistake, to the point where Sedaris is afraid to speak a single word of French, in fair and certainty that it is wrong, and in the end what was sup-posed to be a good class, became a

nightmare.

Despite of this Sedaris has a rather relaxed way of describing this seemingly awful part of his life. His tone is quite informal, for example he starts his essay with: (“At the age of forty-one, I am returning to school…”, p. 1, l. 1). Clearly stating that the following is a personal anecdote, which is a staple the essay genre. In addition to that he also uses everyday terms like “An easy ten-minute walk”, and “raffle off”. Another thing Sedaris uses allot of is imagery (“it’s everyone into the language pool, sink or swim”, p. 1, l. 16) and (“bathing in the subtle beauty of each new curse and insult”, p. 3, l. 124).

The perhaps most strange aspect of the tone is the constant use of humour. A rather entertaining ex-ample is the criticism of assigning genders to intimate objects, where Sedaris comes up with the col-ourful sounding characters of: (“Why refer to Lady Crack Pipe or Good Sir Dishrag…”, p. 2, l. 75). An-other example of this humour is the way Sedaris portrays the teacher’s speech, making some of the words hogwash to underline that she is speaking French, and that he can’t understand her, (”Has eve-ryone apzkiubjxow?”, p. 1, l. 22). He even adds humour to what is downright appalling events like: (”When the teacher poked a shy Korean in the eyelid with a freshly sharpened pencil…”, p. 2, l. 112). By doing this he maintains the humorous tone but also manages to distance himself from what could be described as a mildly traumatic experience.

The purpose of this tone is first and foremost to keep the reader interested, and to keep them reading until the end of the essay, if Sedaris has chosen for example an outraged tone he would be less read-able. The humorous tone also makes the situation more relatable, and allows the reader to more easily sympathise with Sedaris and his fellow students. What is perhaps the foremost function of this specific tone is to point out just how utterly absurd the teacher’s actions and style of education really are.

The teacher is one of the essay’s primary focus points. She is described in a very specific way, for ex-ample the teacher doesn’t walk, she, (”…marched in…”, p. 1, l. 17). She is also assigned almost preda-tory mannerisms like, (”a wild animal”, p.1, l. 82), and (”she crouched low for her attack”, p. 1, l. 52). The teacher disposition towards her students seems to have been predetermined before even meet-ing them, as she makes cruel devastating attacks based on a short presentation of themselves, which she herself asked for. (”The teacher killed some time accusing the Yugoslavian girl of masterminding a program of genocide”, p. 1, ll. 60.61). Her method of teaching is punishment in the form of public humiliation, in response to mistakes, which in the teachers mind will stop the students from making mistakes.

The teacher succeeds.

After being berated for every little mistake, and spending enormous amounts of time preparing for class, Sedaris stops making mistakes, but only because he has become too scared to speak up. Eventually this fear even carries on from the classroom to the rest of his life, (”My fear and discomfort crept beyond the borders of the classroom and accompanied me out onto the wide boulevards”, p. 2, ll. 98-99). In the end of the essay Sedaris states: (”Talk me more, you, plus, please, plus”, p. 3 l. 128). The meaning of this is unclear, as it might mean that he has grown resilient enough to ignore the teacher’s abuse, or that he has had his moral shattered so utterly and complete-ly that he has just given

up.

The atmosphere of the classroom was almost that of a warzone (“We soon learned to dodge chalk and protect our heads and stomachs whenever she approached us with a question”, p. 2ll. 83-84). In-stead of having students compete, and strive to better themselves, their instead hid their fear of the tyrannical teacher, (“there was no sense of competition”, p. 3l. 111). Sedaris even compares the at-mosphere to that of a refugee camp, stating that conversations like (”Sometime me cry alone at night”, p. 3, l. 108), would take place.

Although Sedaris does not give us his direct opinion on how education should be handled, there are several assumptions I would label as ‘fair’. First and foremost he is opposed to the hostile method of the teacher, as it leads to students being afraid to actually utilise their attained skill, after all what is the point of knowing a language if your too afraid to speak it. He seems to believe that there should be a sense of competition among students, so as to motivate them to accomplish greater things.

I would agree with this consensus. The behaviour of the teacher is utterly unacceptable, and should be a thing of the past. Education is a matter of teamwork between the students and the teacher, and to me some of the most important thing in a classroom is, a willingness to learn among the students, mutual respect from both parties, and patience from the teacher. Of course mistakes aren’t to be ig-nored, but to succeed you must first try, and trying involves failing, ‘you miss 100% of the shots you don’t take after all.