Me Talk Pretty One Day

I loved David Sedaris's piece of writing, "Me Talk Pretty One Day". His writing is descriptive and vivid, and the situation he describes is one I could  relate to.You can almost physically feel that familiar nervous anxiety about school, and we can really empathize with his fear of this nameless, monstrous teacher. I think at some point we've all had a teacher from h*ll, and his colorful description of his whole experience makes it seem like you're sitting in a desk  right next to him.  

I love the authors expressive writing about his first day; we can really feel his anxiety and intimidation when he meets his future classmates. They are well dressed, appear to speak excellent French, and are young -- causing David to feel, in his own words, “Like Pa Kettle trapped backstage after a fashion show.” I haven't the foggiest clue who “Pa Kettle” is, or why his being trapped behind the scenes of a fashion show would be an awkward situation, but I get the feeling that my lack of knowledge might very well be a calculated and intentional phenomenon. I doubt David’s fellow students would have understood the analogy, either... I think this painfully outdated funny is used by the author as a humorous reminder to the audience of his age, and I love the “interactive nature” of this writing trick -- I’m left confused by this (clearly) “old guy” and his apparently meaningless joke, but an older reader may understand it completely, and may experience a mutual understanding with the author, knowing how it feels to make references that fly right over a younger persons head.

David Sedaris’s humor goes to good use in this piece, but his writing still retains, up until the last couple of paragraphs, an anxious, miserable, almost dark feeling. We can feel, along with David, an increasing hopelessness and sense of insecurity as the class goes on. This miserableness not only exists in his class, but pervades in everyday aspects of his life as mundane as buying coffee and answering the telephone. And it gets even darker. He compares class with his teacher to “spending time with a wild animal”, and it isn't long before we are informed of an incident of her committing actual violence against one of her students (albeit accidentally). 

In one scene as sad as it is humorous, (and from which this piece derives its name), David and his fellow students converse in the hallway using their barely intelligible French, and the author doesn't bother offering a polished translation. “Sometimes me cry alone at night.” Geez. Rough stuff. “That be common for I, also, but be more strong, you. Much work and someday you talk pretty.” This broken, engrish interpretation of bad French, plus his use of nonsense words for some of the teachers words not understood, is fantastic. It makes it possible to get inside the ears of the author -- an essential effect in this story. David Sedaris’s entire work is an exercise in transporting the reader to his experience and his place, and he does this masterfully.

At the end of this passage, David finally begins to understand what his brutal teacher is saying, and is triumphant -- this means he can finally begin to truly learn, and his teacher's curses become like music to his ears. I don't know how the story ends, but I think its pretty safe to assume that he does eventually learn French, and I also think that today, far from hating his old teacher, he feels nothing but gratitude towards her. After all, in my experience anyway, the teachers who I have most feared very often turned out to be the ones through whom I ended up learning the most.