TestimonialsFor this series, journalist and director Stefania Rousselle sets off on the roads of France, with a simple question: “How are you? “This week, Marion Gandiglio, 53, professor of philosophy in reclassification. She lives in Florentin, in the Tarn.
“I had my Friday beer after work, in a super nice little café-bookstore. I was on my phone, and I see that I received my blood test results. I had muscle pain and the doctors had recommended me to do some. I look at them. I understand nothing. I do a search on the Internet, and there, I read: “myeloma”. Panic on board. Myeloma is cancer of the bone marrow. Average life expectancy: five to seven years. I will die.
This cancer, it would be due to my exposure to pesticides and the Chernobyl cloud. I would have been irradiated and poisoned. All those years I lived surrounded by vineyards, I thought I was protected, and not in fact, I was in the wrong place. However, I was convinced that there was another trigger: my work.
I was a philosophy teacher. It had been twenty-five years. It was not necessarily my vocation, no. I wanted to be a book publisher or a journalist – I saw myself as a special correspondent in Palestine. But I failed the entrance exams. So I said to myself: “Pass the Capes”, and I got it. I also passed the aggregation, but I picked up the oral. And in fact, it did me a lot of good to be a teacher. I had to be squarely on point with my subject, and that motivated me. I knew it was nothing, philosophy, well, not a specific job. But I said to myself that the students, I was going to help them to build their critical spirit, so that they did not live with prejudices. I was enthusiastic. And this freshness, I really hoped to pass it on to the students. But in fact, I was disillusioned.
Me, I taught in the technological sectors, where the coefficient of philosophy for the bac was 2. The other subjects, they were at 9. So, already, a priori, they did not care about my subject. And the kids that I had, they were frustrated. They didn’t want to be there. What they wanted was to be in a professional sector to learn a trade – rather than marketing. They would surely even have flourished there. The problem is that the places there were expensive, because you have to find the company that takes you on an internship. And when there are no more businesses in the area, what do we do? These kids, they came from Graulhet, a city in the Tarn completely devastated socially and economically. Their parents had dropped the case with them. So they picked up.
But I fought for them. To involve them. Get them interested. Put me on their level. I made them do simple exercises that put them in a situation of success. I even went up to the ministry to see if we could change the bac exam: instead of doing a dissertation, take an oral; instead of commenting on a text, answer questions about the text. Their response: “You undermine the sacrosanct dissertation, you don’t think about it, madam.” I had tried everything. And the students, they were overwhelmed by the difficulty.
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