Photo: Bob Edme/APIf I underestimated the anger provoked by Ségolène Royal's comments about teachers' hours in this post yesterday, I certainly don't any longer. First of all, a clarification: as a number of readers have pointed out, when I wrote that French teachers "work" around 17-18 hours a week, I should have said "teach". As I thought I'd made clear via a quote further down the piece (but obviously hadn't), their lesson preparation and marking takes place outside these hours and, as Royal herself pointed out, often at home.
As another of the teachers I quoted says, this is sometimes because French schools are ill-equipped to support teachers. Over to a reader from Saint-Etienne who emailed me this morning:
"French teachers DO NOT only work 17 or 18 hours a week!! They do 17 or 18 hours face-to-face teaching. They also prepare their lessons, mark papers etc... If French teachers were made to do this preparation work etc at school, the state would have to spend a fortune on computers and staff rooms in French schools, which might not be such a bad thing. As it is, teachers in France have to use their own PC to work on as there aren't enough to go round at school!!"
"You could have also mentioned that they are pretty badly paid, considering they're doing the basic job of preparing the country's human resources," adds a journalist at Radio France.
Point taken. On the other hand, Charyxena commented this morning: "Some of my friend's colleagues DOUBLE their hours in private tuition. Some even teach their own students privately. That is amazing, they mess up their students and then charge them for putting them right!"
Yesterday, Daniel Cohn-Bendit, one of the leaders of the 1968 student protests, came out in support of Royal's comments. But Cohn-Bendit has already divided opinions on the left: a Green, he backed the EU constitution when many socialists considered it an endorsement of globalisation.
In order to win the nomination outright tonight, Royal needs 50% of the vote. If she doesn't get it, the two leading candidates go forward to a second round next week. Liberation says polling experts predict she will take the nomination tonight, with Laurent Fabius, a 60-year-old former PM closely associated with the Mitterand era, in second place, and the rather professorial Dominique Strauss-Kahn, who has styled himself as a social democrat, third, though his rating has risen in recent days.
Her supporters argue that she is bound to take the second round, if not the first, and only 157 days remain until the presidentials in May: "Why lose a week?" one tells Le Figaro.
Thanks to the highly unofficial SegoleneRoyal.com site, Royal also exists as an avatar in the virtual world of Second Life.
It should be added that her avatar appears naked on one page in the site, though in a manner unlikely to shock Guardian Unlimited readers. "In Second Life, turquoise bikinis haven't been invented yet," says the creator of her avatar - a reference to the flattering photos of Royal on a beach this summer, which appeared in a magazine under the headline: "And to think she's 53!"
Note the spoof Socialist Party logo, which shows a hand grasping a fleur-de-lys rather than the official rose - an allusion to her allegedly bourgeois origins and her surname.
