Summary Of Me Talk Pretty One Day By David Sedaris

David Sedaris has a hard time understanding his French teacher while he is living in Paris, we read as he completes his journey to understanding her, in his essay “Me talk pretty one day” written in 2005. Though his teacher is strict and sometimes abusive, he ends up with achieving something that he can be happy with, by trying and pushing through. We follow as Sedaris takes a stroll down memory lane in his essay about his experience in Paris, trying to learn French, under what he tells us she is, a dictator teacher. A teacher can mean everything for the capability to learn, and the amount the students get out of the classes, and in this essay, the way Sedaris learns is a strict learning process.

Sedaris has throughout the text, a half-informal

… I was determined to create some sort of identity for myself”. (p. 7 ll. 90-93). Sedaris has an open attitude towards learning a foreign language. Even though he has a quite abusive and unpleasant teacher, he is still determined to success, and he wishes to make his teacher proud. To prove to her, that he is in fact not useless and horrible. “My fear and discomfort crept beyond the borders of the classroom and accompanied me out into the wide boulevards… These things were out the questions, as they involved to speak… When the phone rang, I ignored it... If someone asked me a question, I pretended to be deaf”. (p.7 ll. 98-103). Sedaris is definitely not comfortable speaking the language he is learning, not in class or out between other people. He does not want to speak it in public, but in that way, he will not learn how to speak it. Though in the end of the essay, we are told that he suddenly understands all the teacher is saying. That still does not mean that he can speak the language, and not wanting to interact with other people in that said language means that you cannot learn from your mistakes, and understand other dialects. Though understanding and speaking do not automatically go hand in hand, it is better to understand all or some of it than be able to speak. Understanding is the first step in learning a

The way people learn is very different. Some people need a strict and tough learning environment; others need praising and soft words. The teacher is the most important object in peoples learning process. One bad teacher in a subject can ruin the whole subject for the student, where it before was their favourite subject. It is the teacher who explains the subject so the people studying ex. Maths, can understand it and expand their knowledge. If they receive a horrible teacher who is might not as good as explaining the subject and therefore, they do not get the complete knowledge, as they would have gotten before. Moreover, the teaching can be unsufficient; the teacher can be missing the qualifications, which are needed in that specific situation. Sedaris tells the reader that he was so uncomfortable in the classroom that it spread to his life outside of school. He did not speak French anywhere else. The teacher had such a bad influence on him that he would not speak the language he was learning outside of the classroom. However, the teacher is not always to blame for the students’ lack of knowledge. It all comes down to people’s attitude towards learning. If people truly want to learn, they will. If people does not want to learn, they will not. In addition, a teacher with a classroom full of students willing to learn, they are more motivated to teach. If it is the opposite, the teacher is less