Exasperated teacher sets students test on ‘Noddy’ book
Class of 12-year-olds were threatened with infant test as only three students in the class of 23 had read the set book
Writing on Facebook in a private teachers’ group, the exasperated teacher decided to set his students - who are in the "5ème" year at school - a tongue-in-cheek test on the book, Oui-Oui à la Ferme (Noddy at the Farm), which is usually more appropriate for students in CE1 (6-7 year-olds).
His somewhat-sarcastic questions included: “Read the text carefully. Have you read the text; yes or no? What is the name of the main protagonist? What is the opposite of ‘no’? How many legs does Oui-Oui have? Are you really sure? Is this character Oui-Oui, Non-Non, Emmanuel Macron, or Obi-Wan Kenobi? If you find these questions too difficult, simply write your name without mistakes here, for 50% of the marks”.
The teacher took to Facebook after setting his students the task of reading the Philip Pullman book Les Royaumes du Nord (originally published in English as Northern Lights), and realising that “of 23 students, only three had read the book in its entirety, and only two others had read the first two chapters”.
He wrote that he had been reminding the students to read the book for months, and had even personally helped some of them to buy it from Amazon or hire it from a local library.
He had set the task, he said, because he would have “loved it if his teacher had enabled him to discover this book when I was 12”.
At the end of his exasperated Facebook post, the teacher wrote: “If you have finished, and you are not too tired, you could read Les Royaumes du Nord.”
The test was not actually distributed to students, and was intended as a joke.
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It was only published after a journalist from Le Figaro newspaper, Éléonore de Vulpillères, discovered it and put it on Twitter in a humorous spirit.
“It was a humorous joke by an exasperated teacher, and he never intended to be rude towards his students,” Vulpillères explained.
And yet, despite the comical nature of the post - which has now been shared almost 36,000 times - some have denounced the teacher for “humiliating” his pupils.
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One reply to the tweet said: “Mistaking your students for idiots will not help them to progress” and others said “the problem here is the teacher, not the students”.
Some suggested that it was the parents’ fault, for not ensuring that their students took their work seriously, but others agreed that the teacher had never meant to give the test to his students, and was perfectly entitled to let off steam and frustration on a private forum.
