I am a parasite. I have been a leech all my life. Ask around and you will find confirmation. When there is something to be done, I start disqualifying myself from day one. Escaquearse is the most important word in the Spanish language, one of the things I learned from my father. I am a professional, dedicated freeloader. A parasite devoted to the cause. There are people who do useful things. Not me. There are people who take up chores because somebody has to do them. Not me. I’ve always been good at dodging responsibilities. This is why I am still shocked about the fact that for two years I have been spending a couple of hours a week helping kids with their homework. It is so not like me. And it is the best thing I do in the whole week.

I don’t remember exactly how it occurred to me to look into that, what my state of mind was. Maybe I thought about it because I knew that my mother had been doing it for a while. But I tend to ignore positive role models, and this doesn’t explain it. Maybe I was bored. Be that as it may, once I was in front of Google, it took about 20 seconds to find Le Crabe Rouge. This is an organization that offers all sorts of activities for kids—there are plenty of them all over Rennes. Most of the kids attending have what one describes as an immigration background. There are neither Maries nor François there. They are called Abdelkrim, Hossein, Erva, Anfal, Yassine, Ziad, etc.

I contacted Le Crabe Rouge by email, telling them something about me—basically making clear that I know things like math and a few foreign languages, but that my French is pretty approximate. They didn’t seem worried about it, and in fact, there is a bit of everything among the people helping there. I don’t know about all of them, and I don’t know who is still actively coming and who isn’t, but there are, for example, a retired journalist who wrote for Libération, a guy who has a small software company, a musician, a cleaning lady, a bunch of students, a cook, or somebody who was for a while a school teacher. Besides that, there are a couple of people running the show, and I guess/hope that they get paid for it. I am not sure, and I guess that fear of getting myself into any chore prevents me from trying to really understand how Le Crabe Rouge works.

I think that I am the only one who is not a French native speaker. While I try to avoid dealing with kids having French homework, my broken French is actually a blessing. You can see how these kids, who know that I am a university professor, get an ego boost when they correct my French, or how reassured they get when I ask them for help because I don’t know how many m’s are in maman. Or is it mamman? Being a Real Madrid supporter is another asset, mostly with the boys. Soccer is an easy way to start the conversation. Surprisingly, there are more Barcelona than PSG supporters among these kids. The Real Madrid-Barcelona rivalry makes it easy to taunt each other a bit, to have some controversy, something to discuss. Before going there, I always read AS, or some other sports paper.

Something I also find surprising, although I don’t know why, is how different these kids are. Some of them are lazy. Or maybe they just want be done with their schoolwork as fast as they can. Others already know everything, have done their homework before arriving, but still want to go through it all. Some of them are just not interested in anything related to school. Others are very eager. Some say that they hate math. Some like math because it is the easiest thing. Actually, some of them really like math and enjoy telling me what they learned about constructions with a ruler and compass, showing off the drawings they made. I sometimes explain to them things like why the angle bisectors in a triangle intersect. Sometimes they don’t like math that much. But sometimes one gets a look in their eyes worth of all the times it flopped.

All of them learn English, and some German and Spanish, but most of them don’t dare to say a word. Then there are those with whom you can have a bit of a conversation. This week, there was a girl like that. Sometimes they have to prepare a little text for class, something like presenting themselves. Unsurprisingly, they don’t really know what to say, and it all becomes something like, My name is Juan. I live in Rennes. I like football. I like pizza. I go to school. If they are minimally willing to collaborate, it is trivial to help them come up with something more interesting to say, like that they play midfield in a club, train three times a week, and on Saturdays compete in league against other local teams. Evidently, they know all of that themselves. They also know the words to say it. But it doesn’t occur to them that they can. Then they are proud and remember for months how well it went. It is very nice to see that pride.

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Each kid seems different, but play is clearly a winner. Some of them have to learn the multiplication tables. This is as dry and drab as it gets, but at some point, it occurred to me to take a bunch of role-playing dice and use them to get random numbers to multiply. That was a hit. It also allowed me to tease them by increasing the range to 12, and then 20, beyond the usual 1-10. Asking drily How much is 7 times 12? to a kid who is just supposed to learn the table of 7 guarantees you a look saying, Why do I care about that shit, and why don’t you understand that this is not what the teacher asked us to learn? If the numbers 7 and 12 come from dice they had never seen before, there is no such resistance.

Competition is also the way to go. Last year I was talking to a kid who had a hard time concentrating. Since it is clear to me that, at least in math, often learning is just a question of repetition, I set the rule that we would finish every day with 5 correct calculations. To get him to do it, I proposed to time him. He got super excited about it. Then he decided that I also had to get timed doing 5 calculations right. And so we ended having a weekly arithmetic race. I must say that the calculations he gave me involved incredibly large numbers, but since he had a fascination with the number 0, I always cruised to victory.

I could continue with things like these, telling how seriously they take questions about how you say this or that in Arabic or Turkish or whatever language they speak at home. How you can see some pride when you tell them that words from their lessons like amalgame, hasard, or orange, came into French from Arabic. Talking to these kids, and seeing their reactions, is really interesting. It also makes me feel like a better human.

In general, going to Le Crabe Rouge is balm for my heart. For a while now, all the news we get are on the horrible side: the war in Ukraine, the war in Gaza, US politics, the rise of the far right, climate change, etc. Being there, and seeing how a random bunch of people spend a few hours a week helping some similarly random kids with their schoolwork, gives you the feeling that there is good in society. And this leads us back to a more real answer to the question of why I contacted Le Crabe Rouge in the first place. Indeed, I lied to you before—we call it poetic license—when I said that I didn’t know I did that. The real reason is that at some point I thought that one of the few things I can do about the world as a private citizen is to try to strengthen civic society, and this is definitely what an organization like Le Crabe Rouge does. This is why this post appears not only under the category life, but also under the category politics.

A final thought. I am amazed at how zen I am when I talk with the kids at Le Crabe Rouge. There is no way I would be this tranquil with the being. I would be much more demanding and much more bothered by her not knowing something, or not doing it right. I am not sure if this means that I should be more patient at home. What I am sure of is that, with all the good that public school and the French welfare state do for these kids, it is crystal clear how privileged my daughter is for having parents who have the time, energy, education level, and inclination to find it easy and natural to talk with her about what she does in school. There is no social system that can balance that fundamental inequality.