Ella and Charlie put some glitter in their back to school.
Lots and lots of glitter.
Panda stickers too, and fluorescent tape.
Given the arty allure of the two friends, who come out arm in arm from the BHV, a department store, we are ready to bet that their personalized notebooks will be the most beautiful in all of Montreuil (Seine-Saint-Denis).
No question of missing the entry into 6th, despite the fear that wrings hands.
“I'm afraid I won't remember anything in class,” breathes Ella, 11 years old.
“I'm afraid of having bad teachers.
In the movies, there are!
Charlie remarks.
Will the Cesaria-Evora college have its Severus Snape, the intractable master of Harry Potter?
Suspense!
The best girlfriends wriggle, jump, smile under their flowery masks.
There is joy in the Eastpacks.
Of course, the barrier gestures will be there this Tuesday morning, September 1, the start of the school year for some 12.4 million primary and secondary students.
Safety distances too, and this health protocol, the fear of the first case of coronavirus contamination that adults have been mulling over for weeks.
But at scooter height, the Covid-19 re-entry remains the re-entry: the grand reopening of the theater of childhood and adolescence, with costumes and accessories.
What could be more important, finally, than this first fountain pen, which Alizé, 7, will learn to use in CE2?
Dad gave him a blue one, adorned with "pretty little designs of dog paws."
Alice, 9, was surprised, on her return from Brittany, with a new desk in her room.
Discovery as delicious as the reunion with her cat, Cookie.
Christ-All, who does not yet know how to read but "loves to copy all the words" which pass within range of his gaze, will cross the threshold of the CP with on his back a purple satchel full of smileys.
The object is also the pride of his mother.
After months of immense precariousness, she was finally able to offer her three favorite school children their back-to-school supplies.
The little ones unpacked their trousseaux on Sunday, back from their vacation - three weeks with their aunt, in Aubervilliers (Seine-Saint-Denis), 5 km as the crow flies.
Paris, August 30.
Two days before the start of the school year, Emilie, Paul-Noé and Christ-All unpack their supplies.
/ LP / Arnaud Dumontier
Then the tiny Parisian studio in Belleville was transformed into a hairdressing salon: Christ-All and Emilie will sport beautiful braids in front of the mistresses.
As for Paul-Noé, 3 years old, he will tear himself away from his tablet with a certain pleasure.
How is his school?
we ask the youngest.
“She has a roof!
" It's already that.
"They need to see other faces"
"Not all children will be happy to have work again, but the start of the school year has the advantage of putting them back in an ordinary circuit", notes the child psychiatrist Patrice Huerre (co-author of "Places of life, this they say about us. The interior revolution ”, Ed. Odile Jacob, 2017, 23 euros).
Admittedly, the first quarter "will be to watch", warns the specialist, as "the difficulties put under wraps during confinement, because it was necessary to cohabit, are likely to resurface".
For some, too, “confinement has been an oasis of peace from which it will be difficult to escape.
"But as a general rule, this Tuesday marks the return to social life of those under 18," as necessary for them as for the elderly in nursing homes.
They need to see other faces.
Widen the circle.
»And vary the repertoire of games and dialogues.
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In the Sarah-Bernhardt square, where the little Parisians of the 12th arrondissement let off steam this weekend around wooden structures, recess conversations have also resumed, with 48 hours in advance of the opening of the courtyards. .
How many wasp stings, you?
Me, three.
Me, four!
A boy in shorts bends the match: “I saw an Asian hornet.
Big like that.
"
Between two toboggan runs, Naël, 6, whose dinosaur on the t-shirt finishes the crumbs for a chocolate snack, confides his impatience to be at 10 o'clock.
The moment when we know which way, good or bad, the day will fall.
In his yard, we play “Rangers and Pokémon”.
Chez Lô, in Montreuil, is more like “vampire - rabbit” and “cat - candle”.
And everywhere, we discuss.
“The courtyard is like a kind of park,” notes Naël.
As for the classrooms, he already knows them: the director of his elementary school, Reuilly B, sent all the small CPs a video of the premises.
Taking your bearings on the stage is important.
"Controls, it gives a lot of emotions"
“In 4th grade, I told myself that I didn't like school, but confinement made me realize that in fact, I like it.
It keeps me busy, I'm kidding, and the controls give you lots of emotions, ”notes Louciné, 14 years old.
She is happy to come out of the loneliness of online lessons, and to find after two summer months her beloved transverse flute, loaned by the association Orchestra at school.
“I played there a lot during confinement and I got very attached to it,” says the teenager.
Louciné, who enters the 3rd at the college of La Chapelle-la Reine (Seine-et-Marne), realized during the confinement that in fact, she "likes" the school.
/ LP / DR
Her orchestral class, with which she has spent all her time since 5th grade, has paraded "Peter and the Wolf" at the Ministry of National Education as well as at the Potato Festival in her village, near La Chapelle-la-Reine (Seine-et-Marne), last year.
"I hope that we will do other concerts soon, but I'm a little afraid that the rehearsals will be less warm because of the sanitary rules".
Louciné would have wanted so much to continue kissing his friends.
"I would like to see how the others have changed during the summer, and there we will not see anything, with the masks," she also complains.
It's frustrating.
"
There has been so much change.
Fallen teeth, molten voices, lots of accumulated experiences.
So much so that Thomas, 3, would have preferred to “stay all his life in Dinard” in Ille-et-Vilaine, in Grandpa and Grandma's vacation home.
"Me, I went to my first pajama party during the holidays", trumpets Alizé proudly.
At the end of the school year, in his elementary school in Angoulême (Charente), school resumed, but the comrades did not all reappear.
"There was no Maxence, no Maelys, no Amaury, no Antoine ..." counts the little girl, friend with "all the CE1s" and, soon, she has no doubts, "all the CE2s" in her school.
VIDEO. At school, "adults wear the mask", announces Blanquer
Camille, Alexandre and Mathieu, almost 30 years old between them, are among these long absent children.
They missed their neighborhood for six months, refugees they were, like so many wealthy Parisians, in a second home in Lège-Cap-Ferret (Gironde), then on vacation in Portugal.
Not really the prison, the three heads blondes by the sun agree.
“After the video lessons, I went to bathe, I had my little habits, I settled in,” says Mathieu, who is entering 4th grade in a middle school in the center of the capital.
“But all the same, Cap Ferret, we found it very long.
There were all five of us all the time, us, mum and dad.
We couldn't see anyone.
So back to school, you think, they're not going.
They run there: “It's been a little six months since we saw our friends!
"
"It's a rather special return to normal"
Adam, 7 years old and with a strong sense of priorities, is eager to get back to school "firstly, for friends, second, for math".
He could add: third, to have peace, between friends.
And the best place to keep friends, the spice of life, is the canteen "where you have time to chat, especially when you have two hours to eat", appreciates Anaïs.
But the schoolgirl, in 3rd in an establishment in Toulon (Var), will have to sacrifice this ritual to the constraints of the coronavirus: to avoid putting the slightest risk to her father, whose health is fragile, she will come home for lunch this year.
Like his brothers Matéo and Rafaël, he will also have to throw clothes in the dirty laundry as soon as they come out of the chest, every evening.
"It's a rather special return to normal", summarize the young people of the Var, not thrilled at the idea of wearing the mask "by 30 degrees in classrooms without air conditioning or fan".
Matéo, 15, Anaïs, 14, and Rafaël, 12, are back in Toulon (Var) with special precautions, to protect their father, whose health is fragile./LP/DR
For Maeva, a studious final year student at Bully-les-Mines (Pas-de-Calais) high school, the essential is safe.
Even transformed with great blows of arrows on the ground, red and white ribbon filling the corridors, his chest has basically not changed, because his pillars - the teachers - have not wavered.
Special mention to her SVT teacher who helped her so much last year to get out of a bad patch: "the impression that the whole class was laughing at me".
Computer for the notes, and the number of the school life assistant who seconds her in maths… The young woman, in a situation of handicap because of a juvenile arthritis which, at times, paralyzes her, has prepared her school bag with in mind, the joy of seeing these adults “with whom we have a good laugh”.
Two summer months to "toil like crazy"
The great interest of the start of the school year is also that it sends parents back to work, and with them "do not do this" and "do so that".
Air !
Joshua, 14 years old, will not contradict us, he who awaits the 8 o'clock bell like deliverance, after two summer months to toil "like a patient".
Note that the boy was unlucky, the past school year.
"I didn't work too hard at the start, I thought I would make up for it in the third trimester, and then the confinement arrived…"
Joshua, 14, hadn't worked very hard at the start of the year, expecting to make up for it in Q3.
"And then the confinement arrived ..." / LP / Arnaud Dumontier
Red alert for the blond head: in view of his reports, he was not admitted in general second, unless he showed unfailing motivation, as well as a certain number of math exercises.
Yet he is "quite a good student," he says, although the expression makes his mother choke a little - "So this one is the best!"
"
Still, the fellow begins his second with concrete bases, and not scared for a penny by the reform of the school.
He "likes change".
His big sister Jade, 16, does not say as much, not quite sure that it is about his choice of first specialty, nor of the benefits of the new bac, which now takes place for 40% in continuous assessment.
"It's as confusing for teachers as for us, this reform," plague the young girl, who admits to having "not done much" for four months.
All the same, in the gloomy prospect of a school year long as a day without bread, a silhouette emerges, in the person of his history teacher.
The guy had to impress: it is the only adult face she remembers, after these long “corona-vacations”.