“We are pawns that they place wherever they want”: after the announcements of the Minister of National Education, a maths teacher assigned to modern literature in a high school

In response to high school anger and the emergency, the Minister of National Education Édouard Geffray announced Thursday October 8 the deployment of more than 3,000 replacement teachers in more than 500 high schools in difficulty in France in the coming days. Among these tenured teachers in the replacement zone (TZR), who constitute a pool of teachers awaiting assignment, Agathe, a mathematics teacher, received an appointment order that was, to say the least, ludicrous.

She discovered her assignment by email, the day after the Minister of National Education's announcement. This is his first year of teaching. “An assignment to an establishment which is 50 kilometers from my home establishment, which is still 120 kilometers from my home. And it is in another department, so it is completely outside the area which had been assigned to me,” she explains.

“I’m not trained at all.”

Since the start of the school year, Agathe has worked in a local establishment in Île-de-France, but she does not have a regular class. “The funniest thing in the story is that I am a mathematics teacher and I am assigned as a modern literature teacher in a high school. Knowing that at the high school the students prepare for the French baccalaureate and that I am not at all trained to present texts to them, make comments, or whatever, on them,” she laments. This math teacher doesn't know the literature program. “Proust, Émile Zola, I imagine…”

“I don’t even know what the texts are in force for the baccalaureate.”

Agathe, teacher

at franceinfo

For this tenured teacher in the replacement zone, this choice by the Minister of National Education is incomprehensible. "We are pawns that they place where they want, when they want, it's still crazy. And the worst in all of this is that the high school students are demanding certain things, have demands that can be agreed upon, that must be listened to. And they place teachers who are not trained, to be able to say 'we replaced the teachers, it's okay, you can stop your demonstrations.' While high school students have the right to have an adapted education. I am a mathematics teacher, not a modern literature teacher,” she insists.

Agathe is due to take up her duties on November 1, full-time. "I don't know, we'll see. Certainly contact colleagues because there's a good teaching team. We help each other a lot, the teachers, we support each other, it's going to be complicated. But hey, when you don't have a choice. Because apart from resigning, I don't see what else I can do," she explains. The Ile-de-France teacher will contact the rectorate as quickly as possible.