Brianna Di Monda’s essay, “The Year I Taught in a Former Coal Mining Town,” is a personal account of teaching English in Alès, southern France. She places her first year at Lycée Jean-Baptiste Dumas against the gilets jaunes protests and the town’s mining legacy, using the experience to question the way teachers talk about equality.
What was Di Monda’s year in Alès about?
Di Monda says she arrived in France in August 2018, during the first year of the gilets jaunes protests, and taught English at Lycée Jean-Baptiste Dumas in Alès. The essay is not a general history of French mining; it is a teacher’s account of encountering a particular town and its students.
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How does the town’s mining past enter the story?
Di Monda describes Alès as a former coal-mining town. Her essay reports that coal production reached 3.3 million tons in 1958 and that the last mine closed in 2001. She writes that families remained after the closure and that many of their descendants became her students. The figures and dates are claims made in the essay; the available account does not name an underlying statistical source.
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What does the essay say about equality?
The essay’s central tension is captured in its deck: “Teaching in the South of France, I learned that equality was just a story teachers told about themselves.” That framing connects Di Monda’s classroom experience with the gap between teachers’ beliefs about equality and what students’ lives may reveal. The accessible account establishes this as the essay’s stated takeaway, but not the full sequence of classroom events or argument behind it.
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What kind of reading is it?
It is a first-person essay by Brianna Di Monda about teaching in Alès in 2018, with the protests and the town’s industrial history as context. It should be read as her account and reflection, rather than as an independently documented history of the mines or a broad survey of French education.
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