Entre les murs (Collection Folio (Gallimard))

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Rabah Nait Oufella, one of the French students from the film The Class, which won a Palme d'Or at Cannes film festival last year. I think it must be difficult to teach me because I like to wind people up, but I'm a lot calmer now since the film.

Overall, The Class is a remarkable film that proves beyond a doubt that teaching is the hardest job on the planet. The magic of The Class is of course that it doesn't feel like a movie, but like something real, tangible - a slice of life, if you may. Cantet doesn't pretend to have any answers for these questions, and at the film's close, we are left to wonder what Mr Marin has accomplished in the time we've been watching him.We never find out about his home life or his personal life, though one pupil offers a cheeky speculation, which is to be subtly important.

Acting has always been my passion and it would give me great pleasure to succeed in it as a profession. He is ridiculed by the class, as students claim this would only be used “in the Middle Ages”, and that they would never think of using this phrase when talking to their friends or family. I would find it difficult to believe someone who said s/he didn't feel what it is like to be in that classroom.One of the most valuable and relevant life lessons that my University has taught me is the purpose of education itself. I do not want to spoil any of the later developments, but will only say that the film doesn’t offer any easy solution or happy end. The Class is based on an autobiographical novel by author and former teacher François Bégaudeau, about working at a tough multi-ethnic school in the Parisian banlieux. One of the first scenes of the film sets the tone and highlights the tension in the classroom: as the students work on the imperfect tense in French, one question from a student leads François to talk about the imperfect subjunctive (for the linguists among you, in the sentence, “il fallait que je fusse ” / “I had to be”, “fusse” is the imperfect subjunctive form of the verb “être”).

Directed by Laurent Cantet, it chronicles a year in the life of a high-school classroom and uses actual pupils from Françoise Dolto as actors. François is a caring and passionate teacher, but we see him struggling to maintain his authority and to keep the group of 25 teenagers he teaches every day interested in French language and literature .François is relatively calm, humorous and approachable, but actually a stickler for good manners and with maybe too thin a skin. However, after an argument over football teams with Will, another boy who is problematic, Souleymane insults François and is sent to the head teacher's office. This is also emphasised by the fact that the teacher in the film, François Marin, is played by the author of the novel, François Bégaudeau, so the boundary between fact and fiction tends to blend.