School Days

“I still see her in the classroom, her hand raised,” says Pauline Popa-Jones, the head of section for Emma’s years in middle and high school, from 2010 to 2017. I had a chance to speak to Mrs. Popa-Jones in her classroom as she was getting ready to retire in just a few days. Indeed, one of Emma’s besties says her classmates would poke fun at her for this, hand twisting in the air. Was it impatience? Did she really know the answer BEFORE the question was out? Perhaps an insatiable quest to learn. Once after a class trip to Scotland, Emma was quick to give the organizer feedback: “That was fun, but a little short on content.” Emma was an ace of a student, in an amazing class of students. They were brilliant, creative, and fun-loving. It wasn’t perfect. There were sometimes painful teenage issues over the years. But generally, the students comprised a happy class. This class was the first class of a new “international section” at the school. The other state school in Paris housing such a program was oversubscribed. There was room at Camille See to build another section dedicated to British language and literature. Students would follow the standard French curriculum and have classes in British language and literature, as well as history/geography in English. That made the already long French school day one hour longer, and some students traveled more than an hour each way for this program—by themselves--on bike or public transportation. Emma had a relatively short 20-30 minute commute. Still, it was a commitment. There were innumerable class trips and activities for the class, which enjoyed a normal pre-Covid education. There was Model U.N., the history bee, a class play … outings to the theater and two trips to the U.K. About the history bee, which included students from elite schools across Paris, the seas parted when they saw the crew from Camille See. “Who are they anyway?” Emma overheard some of the kids saying. “We tried to take advantage of everything related to the curriculum in Paris,” Mrs. Popa-Jones said. She pointedly remembers taking the class to an Oscar Wilde exhibition in 2011, “Beauty, Morals and Voluptuousness in the England of Oscar Wilde” at the Musee d’Orsay. The museum guide was perplexed about how to approach the subject for 11- and 12-year-olds, but was bowled over by the questions from students about the “aesthetic movement” of which Wilde was a part, in the last decade of Queen Victoria’s reign. The reigns, so to speak, had loosened a bit, also giving us artists like James McNeill Whistler and Aubrey Beardsley. There was a lot of project work, which was not common at the time in the French system. As part of the exploration of the Victorian era, Mrs. Popa-Jones had the students create the front page of a newspaper of the time. The English teacher would paper her classroom with her favorite works, among them a poster she attributed to Emma, “The Victorian Times,” including spelling errors and a liberal use of exclamation marks!!! What I love is the faint suggestion of a crown about the queen’s head. Another one of Emma’s posters made the cut, “King of Shadows,” a poster to publicize a film based on a book by Susan Cooper read for class. In the book, an American boy travels back 400 years in time, to the year 1599, when the Globe Theatre was first built. He meets William Shakespeare and acts with him in the play he had rehearsed for in his own time in Greenville, North Carolina.

While most of the posters will remain in the classroom, subject to the fates of time, Mrs. Popa-Jones detached these two from the wall and presented them to me, these lovely works from days gone by, touched by Emma and touching.

I should mention one more poster—of Emma herself. English teachers at Camille See created and added a poster picturing Emma and featuring a quote that she sent to her bestie when she was about 12 years old. There she is, next to the Bard and other greats, and at various other places in the school. I hope her words will inspire the next generation at Camille See.*

“She always said ‘thank you’ after each class,” Mrs. Popa-Jones said, as she did to all of her teachers. Now that makes a parent proud!!! Indeed, thank you to all of the amazing teachers and administrators at Camille See, English and French, for helping to build and keep the International Section.

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*Before I begin, here’s a quote from Buddha: “The secret of health for both mind and body is not to mourn for the past, not to worry about the future, nor to anticipate troubles, but to live in the present”.

Do not dwell on what has happened, or what is to come, what hasn’t happened, what isn’t to come. That is often where we look for happiness, in awards we have yet to begin, friends we have yet to make... But we should seek happiness more in the present, random, small, insignificant happenings that just make us smile, no matter if we just got a 0 on a math test, or suffer from unrequited love... Because in fifty years, what will those matter? Live in the moment because that’s where the happiness is.

If you think too much about other people’s opinions or even about your future self’s, you’ll never find those genuine memories that you’ll cherish for the rest of your life, no matter how small, how significant, how life changing. They matter to you. Right now. And, if you can learn to embrace the present, and live every moment like it’s your last, that’s where true happiness is. You know you’ve hit rock bottom when you don’t care what you’re doing, when you don’t care if these are your last seconds to live. But, if you ask yourself what makes a person truly happy, you’ll find it hard to get an answer. Because it is hard. It’s hard to be happy, because we think too much these days.

It’s hard to find true happiness but then again, it’s easy.

It’s right there, you just have to reach for it. Emma Burke Newman, in a text to a classmate, 2012