Lessons from abroad

Teaching in France helps Hillsborough High alum learn.

By: Emily Craighead
   For Emma Gregory, teaching English is all about learning.
   A 2000 graduate of Hillsborough High School and a 2004 graduate of Johns Hopkins University, Ms. Gregory is spending the year in France teaching English to French high school and college students.
   She is one the more than 1,000 American citizens between ages 20 and 34 hired by the French Ministry of Culture to teach English to high school and university students.
   Faced with students well-versed in American cliches from McDonald’s to FOX TV’s "American Idol" (the French have "Star Academy") but not in other aspects of U.S. culture, Ms. Gregory has had to take a closer look at her own perceptions.
   In some cases, she made surprising discoveries, and in others, confirmed her beliefs.
   Ms. Gregory is living in Caen, a city of 117,000 in Normandy two hours from Paris by train and about seven miles from the Atlantic Ocean. The city is near the beaches where the Allies landed on D-Day. William the Conqueror’s final resting place is in one of Caen’s abbeys.
   Insulated from the tourists and immigrants who flock to Paris, Caen is, in a way, more French. Ms. Gregory said she estimates 99 percent of her students have French parents and grandparents, and about 90 percent are from Normandy.
   "Living in France has made me realize just how diverse religiously and ethnically America is," Ms. Gregory wrote in an e-mail on Jan. 5. Ms. Gregory noted that previously she has lived only in New Jersey and Baltimore, Md., which are places with relatively diverse populations.
   In December, Ms. Gregory asked her students how they would spend the holiday, and all said they celebrated Christmas. Still, Ms. Gregory said she has found that in France, a country where 88 percent of the population identifies itself as Catholic and students get a week off for All Saints Day, religion is less important to daily life than in the United States.
   "I never realized before living in France how religious Americans in general are," Ms. Gregory said.
   Living in France has taught Ms. Gregory about cultural differences, but it’s also taught her how to make mistakes.
   "It is scary when you are not completely confident in your French skills to start talking to a French person," she said. "I am a perfectionist and I hate making mistakes, and it is even worse to make speaking mistakes in front of native speakers. But I try to make myself overcome this so that I can meet people as well as improve my French."
   After a few days of saying "bonjour" each morning to the instructors in the teachers’ lounge and buying a sandwich at the bakery, conjugating a verb incorrectly seems less frightening.
   It was only a month or so into Ms. Gregory’s stay that holding a conversation in French was within her reach.
   "The most enjoyable thing for me is just being able to talk to a French person in French and have them understand me," she said. "I went to a teacher’s house for dinner … and spent four hours eating and chatting with her and her husband. When I left I was in shock: I had just had four hours of in-depth conversation without speaking a word of English."
   Apart from the massive amounts of paperwork the French demand to feed their bureaucracy, Ms. Gregory said being away from home is the most difficult part of living in France.
   "It is not really a surprise for me as I have always known I was a homebody — I had a three-hour limit on where I could go to college," she said.
   When she returns to the United States in May, Ms. Gregory plans to pursue an advanced degree studying visual perception.
   Moving on to the next chapter in her life, Ms. Gregory will be prepared with new language skills, cultural lessons and personal insights.