The Trousse, the Whole Trousse, and Nothing but the Trousse.

The French, looked on by the rest of the world as having a lacsidaisical approach to work with their 35-hour workweek, six weeks of annual vacation and their seemingly incessant habit of grèving, are actually more productive than anyone else on the planet (I’m assuming we can ignore Norway, right?). Even the Japanese and the Americans don’t match France’s economic output on an hour-by-hour basis.

If you have a child in the French educational system, then you know that this productivity starts at an awfully young age. The school system is grueling, intensive and almost entirely devoid of fun and useless extracurricular activities (there are no school sports, theatre productions or orchestras, etc. that dominate the lives of American youngsters). Mountains of homework. It’s all learning all the time, even on Saturdays, though thankfully that will change next year.

What is it about the educational system that makes them so productive, though? I submit to you the trousse. Every French student has one (even university students). We don’t even have a word for it in English. The closest we can get is something along the lines of pencil case or pencil carrier or pencil box. I didn’t grow up with one. I’m pretty sure that on the few occasions when I was organized enough to take my own pencil to school, I tossed it in my backpack and then later fished it out by rummaging around underneath the books. Normally I would just bum one off of a friend while honestly believing that when I got home, I would definitely put a pencil in that little loop of plastic on the inside flap of my Trapper Keeper. My organizational skills have not advanced with age.

In the short span of time between our moving here and my kids starting school, we accidentally built up a respectable collection of trousses. I don't know how this happened. We’d buy some Babybel cheese and acquire a free Babybel trousse along with it. We’d buy a set of Disney Princess markers and get a pink princess trousse. We’d go eat a pizza at Del Arte and come home with three trousses advertising kids’ meals. I’d buy a 5-liter bottle of Ariel laundry detergent and pick up yet another trousse. I had no idea what these little soft-sided, oblong pouches were and I certainly didn’t know the word for it. Every time I cleaned the house, I would find stray trousses under the sofa cushions, stuck randomly in the bookshelf cubbyholes, and for some odd reason, all over the kitchen. Sometimes I would find my lost lipstick inside, sometimes a Kinder Surprise toy. Eventually we had so many that they earned their own box in our playroom—a sort of an hyper-trousse for the trousses to live in. Yes, I would store empty trousses because heck, I didn’t know what to do with them and yet couldn’t bring myself to throw away free promotional items. Yes, my European friends, that is a cultural taboo, deadly sin, and quite possibly capital crime where I come from—never toss out free marketing booty, no matter how worthless.

Fastfoward to yesterday. Between then and now, the trousse has become a vital member of our family. It has taken on an importance of biblical proportions. My oldest, Maya, treats hers with more respect than she treats me. Usually. So I don't know how, but during the winter vacances, it went AWOL. And I’m such a bad mom that I didn’t notice and I even sent her to school on Monday without it. A proper French mother would sooner send her daughter to school without shoes, pants, or—gasp!—scarf than without her trousse.

Yesterday, when we were walking out the door to go to school, Maya stopped suddenly and said, “Mais, mais, ma maitresse . . . elle m’a dit que j’ai besoin de ramener mes affaires!” Your huh? Your affairs? Like what, your last will and testament? The most recent statement for your BNP Paribas kiddie savings account? What kind of affairs does someone in the first grade have? She rolled her eyes. Mes affaires! Tu sais! Maya, I said, "speak to me in English." She rolled her eyes again. Ma trousse! That’s not English. She crossed her arms and glared at me. I can’t wait for the teen years with this one. Maya, I said, “Your trousse is in your bag.”

Only it wasn’t. And this is a huge deal. Without the trousse, a French student doesn’t even know how to breathe. Without the trousse, a French student doesn’t pass the BAC. Without the trousse, Maya might grow up to be a garbage collector. Maya, where’s your trousse? Another eye roll. She said something in French about if she knew where it was, well, duh, obviously it would be in the bag. Now we’re late to school and I’m looking all over for her British-flag trousse, which I didn’t find.

Realizing that her chances of passing the BAC are ticking down by the minute, I quickly made a replacement trousse, running around the house picking up stray pens, pencils, pencil sharpeners and erasers. An emergency trousse. I wonder if French homes have emergency replacement trousses like Americans have those Red Cross boxes in the bathroom full of moldy Band-Aids, alcohol swabs and smelling salts just in case. My replacement trousse was deficient in several areas because there is no way to just on-the-spot replace one unless you’ve got colorful pens, miniature blackboard erasers, glue sticks and white-out pens just hanging around the house waiting to spring into action. Which we don’t.

So what is in a trousse anyway, I hear you cry. I’ll bet you were thinking it’s just some pens and pencils. Oh you are so wrong. What goes in the trousse is what the French government tells you to put in the trousse. Back in the spring, before the September rentrée and before you’re even thinking about next school year, your child will come home with The List.

It’s been a good six months since I’ve dealt with this, so I think I’ve recovered enough to be able to talk about it.

The List. The List of Affaires. In America, if there is a list, it’s some goofball teacher posting some cheesy thing like “Miss Petty’s Third Grade Class. Please Bring: one pound of curiosity, one cup of manners, half a cup of spirit, and three sharpened No. 2 pencils. Miss Petty will bring the fun!” Oh it will be fun, all right. And those third graders will spend the entire year learning a whole bunch of nothing. All because there’s no trousse. Meanwhile, French third-graders are learning advanced calculus, two foreign languages--usually English and German or English and Latin--and reciting Greek poetry. All because there's a trousse.

The List here is a page long. It’s very detailed, indicating quantity, size and color of almost every item. It stirs my rebellious spirit. It will include things like “three 10x15cm blue notebooks”, “five 10x15cm opaque book jackets” and “three red ink pens” and of course the fountain pen with replacement cartridges. The grandes surfaces will bring in school supplies by the bucket-load and post The List by grade level at each aisle. Backpacks, which are also sold according to grade level, increase in size with each school year to accommodate the increase in supplies. If this weren’t bad enough, the grade levels here are written in code. It’s not as easy as first grade followed by second grade followed by third grade and so forth until you either drop out or graduate after the twelfth grade. Here, you don’t fully understand it until you’re knee deep in it. Here it’s cryptic letter and number combinations like CPb, CE1, CM2. This all makes sense to Frenchies. And my children.

Most of the items on The List just go in the child’s backpack, but a shocking amount of this heft gets shoved into the small, slender trousse. As item after item gets crammed in, I wonder whether there’s any limit to what it can hold. It's like Mary Poppins’ carpetbag.

The List is hard enough for French parents, but for foreign parents there’s always at least one word that you don’t know. Last year’s stumper was chiffon. Another fine example of when dictionaries don’t help. Chiffon means cloth. What the heck sort of cloth are we supposed to put in a trousse? How large? And for what? In case she spills something? I asked the teenager standing beside me at Carrefour if he could please tell me what this means. He said it’s for wiping off her blackboard. And he was right. Ah, the little individual-sized blackboards that the French still use in school. Makes me feel like I’m back in that little wooden schoolhouse in Walnut Grove, on the third row, copying whatever Miss Beadle just wrote on her big blackboard at the front of the class.

At first, The List seems kind of weird and random. Why do I need blue notebooks? Can I buy the purple ones instead? But it’s not random. It’s all part of a plan to teach lifelong organization. Which leads to better productivity. The trousse will have a blue pen, a black pen, a red pen and a green pen. I thought maybe it would have something to do with art class. One day I was helping Maya with her homework and we got to the point where she was required to write her answers in her reading and writing notebook, which is blue. She unzipped her trousse and looked up to ask Quelle colour? What do you mean what color? What color of what? This was nonsensical. Quelle colour pour les réponses?

I said, “Maya, you can write your answers in whatever stinkin’ color you want to. The important part is learning how to do the work and hopefully getting it right.” But that’s not the most important part here, at least not at first. For now, the most important part is knowing which color pen to use for which subject. Which color notebook to use for which subject. I’m torn—I want to tell her to write it in black ink instead of blue, but I know that she has to conform in order to succeed here. And besides, I might be deported for speaking such heresy. Luckily for both of us, Maya is too smart to listen to me.