ASU alumna Laurel Zuckerman knew it wouldn’t be easy to pass the four-day exam to become an English teacher in France. But she didn’t expect to turn her adventures into a book that would shed light on the French education system.

“Sorbonne Confidential,” Zuckerman’s book, available in English this month, is based on her experiences and struggles trying to teach in France.

Zuckerman, who graduated from ASU in 1983, said although she experienced everything in the book, she decided to call the main character Alice Wunderland in order to free herself a little from the events.

“I took notes during my experience with the idea of making a little book out of it,” Zuckerman said.

The book consists of anecdotes that happened to people who attempted the teaching exam, as well as various statistics about where France ranks in terms of the students’ capacity to speak English.

“I hoped the reader would see the relationship between the statistics and the stories,” she said.

Zuckerman said 97 percent of French students study English in school for about 10 years, but they seem to have a hard time learning it.

“Maybe it was so hard to learn English because [the teachers] spent all their time teaching other things,” she said. “When I was preparing for this crazy exam, we were doing all this stuff that had nothing to do with teaching English.”

Even though Zuckerman has lived in France for more than 20 years, she said that wasn’t her original intention.

“The idea was to go to France for one year with my boyfriend, and the next thing you know, it was 20 years later,” Zuckerman said.

After losing her job with a dot-com company, she said she didn’t want to ever face unexpected unemployment again.

“I decided to try to change completely and maybe become a teacher,” she said. “In France, teachers can’t ever lose their jobs.”

Prospective teachers are required to take an exam invented about 200 years ago, Zuckerman said. It’s a four-day exam that lasts 7 hours each day, and only 10 percent of the thousands of the people who take it actually pass.

“The big surprise for me is that [the exam] almost had nothing to do with English,” she said. “And that was the starting point for writing the book.”

Zuckerman said the teachers learned odd vocabulary for the exam, and she wondered why that was important for teaching English.

“They have you translate all kinds of strange words that you wouldn’t use in a normal conversation,” she said. “I was trying to figure out who’s the person who can get through this obstacle course.”

When Zuckerman discovered she hadn’t passed, she asked the judges for a copy of her exam, she said.

One portion of her exam had been switched with someone else’s, but she said there was no way to fight it.

“There have been court cases in France where someone contested the grades given by the jury, but the judge said that the jury is sovereign and cannot be questioned,” she said.

This began her investigation of the French education system, and she learned that people all around her were constantly complaining that their children weren’t learning English properly at school.

“At the same time, [the government] was thinking that France has the best teachers in the world,” she said. “Clearly something was wrong.”

Zuckerman said she wrote to members of the French government and asked if they were aware that in the test for English teachers, more than half of the exam is in French.

“Ninety percent of people fail the exam, and that’s a waste of human resources,” she said. “This investigation all went into the book.”

Janet Burke, associate dean of Barrett, the Honors College and the Fulbright campus faculty representative, said about 560 ASU graduates taught English in other countries in 2008.

“I think it gives them a wonderful opportunity to put together a bunch of knowledge that they can pass onto their own students back here,” she said.

Burke said the most common challenge is that students go over expecting one thing and are presented with something different.

But Zuckerman said she’s happy with how everything turned out.

“Something that you want turns out to be not necessarily what you really needed,” she said. “This has been a tremendous opportunity for me, and I discovered [writing] is what I really love.”

Reach the reporter at charlsy.panzino@asu.edu.