It is my last class of the semester at Lycée Aristide Briand in Chatenay-Malabry, seven miles outside Paris where I teach English to a "remedial" group of youngsters of foreign descent for the most part (Portugese, Spaniards, North Africans, Haitians) who have never been to the capital.

I'd promised the kids a party to finish the year en beauté on the scrubby portable hi-fi: rock 'n' roll 45's and permission to bring in guests. Two stunning beauties enter, patent leather thigh boots and thunderstorm eyes. "C'est ici la boom?" their teen arrogance barely arched into a question mark. Yeah, it would be here where I'm dancing with a diminutive Italian, hands on his shoulders, angled down as if on another floor altogether. We keep to the protocol of correct distance although we've already overstepped the sacrosanct boundaries between class and role so dear to the French rigidities.

Time will tell who's left behind
when you go your way & I'll go mine

Bob Dylan prophesies on "Blond on Blond."

The social corral, the herding of the poor, ethnic and racial others has been an integral part of the French educational system whose hegemonic agenda is carried out and solidified by generations of obedient taskmasters serving the best interests of their class.

The day of the party the students and I exchange gifts (a box of candied chestnuts for my little men and a pair of dimestore earrings for me) and taste a little of that illicit pleasure which comes from refusing to cut on the dotted line, from stepping out into a yet unmarked slot (so close to slut they will no doubt say later).

We barely have time to play the B-side before we get busted by Madame la Surveillante Générale who loses her voice the space of a second at the sight of such a breach of decorum. "Why, it's absurd!" she gasps. Class is over. I'm asked to leave. Soon it will be May 68.