First off, L2M is real! …Well, except for the name of the school (though it retains the same bizarre “Canada is the same as America!”-style moniker), its location, and the true identities of and details about the people mentioned herein. But much of what I describe in the background pages (the “book within a book” that I call The Accidental Principal) is very true to the real circumstances of the real school. And the emails and circulars and journal entries and so on that I publish here are simply somewhat edited or expanded versions of real items that I wrote or received while headmistress of a small, private American school housed in a French public school and illegally supported (for a time) by French public monies.
It has been some 15+ years since I began my slightly more than three-year tenure as headmistress — enough time for some perspective, I tell myself (primarily as a means of rationalizing my not having finished writing all of this long since). Enough time for some of the sting of certain episodes to fade away, at least in theory. Enough time to be able to celebrate the long-term success of the real school involved, except that I can’t visit the real school these days without wanting to jump up and down in rage: all heads of school except for my immediate successor have been/are paid appropriately, integrated into the French administration, treated with due respect — in short, everything I was not while running a school targeted for destruction by the local arm of the French national education ministry.
Yes, that sounds paranoid. But it is nonetheless true. I'm glad the real school is now a bona fide part of the larger host school. But in retrospect, there was no reason that this could not have been achieved much earlier (during my time, for example) and without all of the secret shenanigans. But the shenanigans, I suppose, make for a more interesting story, and I have to say that even while slogging through the worst of it all those years ago, I found comfort by telling myself (over and over and over and OVER), “another chapter for the book!”
Believe me, some of those shenanigans make me wish I could use certain real names — there are some stinkers who ought to be made to own their misdeeds. But we live in litigious times, and sometimes civil law cares nothing for truth-telling. Further, if I identify the stinkers, it would be too easy for other parties to be identified, and some of them, at least, deserve to remain as anonymous as the medium allows for — which privacy, I grant, is tenuous at best. But a word to you, dear reader: not every detail associated with a made-up person in this narrative is connected to the real person on whom the character is based. So if you’re part of the old L2M community and you perhaps rightly figure out that “Ambrose Bierce” is really “Laura Green,” and I've described “Ambrose” as a myopic alcoholic, it does not mean that real-life Laura wore glasses and had a drinking problem. It just means that someone in my school had a drinking problem, yes, but it wasn’t necessarily Laura. And lots of people wear glasses. And so on.
Doled out in the chronological bits and pieces typical of the medium, this blog contains material that will hopefully become part of a real book.
