DBSPTA Newsletter 2019 ver12

Some memories about the time of the foundation of the French Club
2019 marked the 150th Anniversary of our school, but also the
90th Anniversary of the French Department created in 1929 by Mrs
Lundlack according to Mr Smily’s manuscript, an history teacher in
DBS in the sixties. Moreover, it is also the time to celebrate the 25th
Anniversary of the French Club.
When it was established around September 1994, it was run by
Dinesh Moorjani as chairman and Vijay Pahilwani, as vice-chairman
who is becoming this academic year 2019-2020 one of our
Mathematics teachers in the IB section
I would like to get this opportunity to thanks Vijay who expressed
himself about this particular period of 1994.
« Back in those days, being a non-Chinese primary
school student often meant that Chinese periods at
school were effectively free lessons to quietly do our
homework or revision for other subjects. For many of
us though, this status-quo changed when we arrived at
DBS as Form 1 students. I found myself in a classroom
with many other non-native speakers of Chinese from
other primary schools, as well as ethnically Chinese
students who had lived in far away lands like Sydney,
Toronto, Louisiana or Johannesburg and only spoke
Cantonese at home - if they did at all. Our shared lacked
of knowledge in one language thus became a uniting
impetus for us to embark on a journey of learning a
language that was the undisputed lingua franca of
the diplomacy world until the Treaty of Versailles was
signed. (Have you never wondered what’s up with “Par
Avion”?) I remember our initial experience with this
intrinsically beautiful language was as far from being
romantic as a linguistic experience could ever be. The
creative highlight of our lessons were confined to the
drawings on mandatory vocabulary cards we were made
to create at the metronomic behest of a French teacher
who was apparently sold to this time-tested but lifeless
approach to language acquisition. Fortunately, French
at DBS began to breathe life when a young Frenchman
took over the helm and integrated French music, poetry,
and cinema into our language learning. Our French
experience soon began to grow beyond the confines of
the four walls as many of us forged formal and informal
ties with the French Club. Reminiscing now on the opportunities
French gave us, I can recount an interview
at an RTHK show French Connections, participating
in an Interschool French Drama Competition as well
as developing with two other Computer Studies students,
an award-winning computer program written in
Pascal to learn French. French continued to serve me
well later on as an IB student where I had an awesome
French room-mate from Nice and even when I took on
a semester of French as a humanities elective at university.
French came in handy later as I toured France with
my friends and during my scientific research in Europe
with my French supervisor and colleague. As the pages
of time swiftly turn in my memory, I find the passages
written in French have begun to fade from a lack of
daily practice. Nevertheless, my gratitude for the French
language has far from diminished. »
A year before Vijay, Marco Wan who is now
Associate Professor of Laws at Hong Kong University
was also a form 5 student in 1993 and graduate with an
A in French examinations of the time. He was in Form
6 in 1994 and he was always very dynamic to promote
French. He still use it fluently and we thank him to give
a bit of his feelings about that time:
« Some of the best memories I have of my time at DBS
are from the French room. Classes were always fun,
partly because they were so wide ranging since the
emphasis was on self expression, we had quite a bit
of freedom when it came to choosing the topics we
engaged with. The focus was always on learning and
exploring, and while exams were obviously in the back
of our minds, that’s where they stayed-in the back
(from my recollection, our cohort did pretty well in the
public exams at the end). Worlds opened up before us
as we moved from thinking about drama to designing
games; from drawing cartoons to reading fiction; and
from watching French television programmes to talking
about culture and politics in a different tongue. Learning
French at DBS gave me wonderful friends, confidence
in formulating my ideas, and an intense curiosity
about the world. «
Moreover, we have found in the French room
vaults the rushs of a movie « Mind Blows » in VHS,
directed by former French boy Ravi Nagdev in 1996 who
was able to edit the first draft of its English version.
Here is a brief interview on the matter.
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DBS PTA Newsletter
2019
DBS PTA Newsletter
2019
37