Madame Jones is one of Viewpoint’s finest teachers. She teaches high school students French. In this story we explore the day in the life of a high school French teacher. She wakes up everyday at 5:30 am and takes her dog out for a run until 6:45. As soon as she gets home she jumps into whatever clothes are closest to her, puts on the bare minimum of makeup, and hopes her husband makes her coffee to run out the door at 7:15 am.
Usually when you think of a teacher arriving at school you’d think they go to their classroom, but not Madame Jones- first thing she does is “bother Ms. Russell and look at what she’s wearing to make sure she’s wearing what I’m wearing, because we always match”. To prepare for her classes for the day she usually thinks about what skills she wants her students to have at the end of the year and what skills need to be built, and she thinks about the skills they already have and how to add on to that with building blocks, making sure there’s lots of listening, speaking, and writing.
What Madame Jones loves working within the Viewpoint community, saying, “I love my students and my colleagues (shout out Coach K and Ms. Russell), but I especially enjoy torturing Phoenix in class. It brings warmth to my black heart!” With her energy, humor, and dedication, it’s clear that Madame Jones is more than just a teacher, she’s someone her students will remember long after they leave her classroom. She said her students are never boring; they ask the funniest questions. Madame Jones told me the funniest thing in her class is when students are speaking French and when they mean to say something they say something entirely different, for example “ One of my native speakers said his grandparents loved to be naked when he meant to say my grandparents love nature, good times”.
And, of course, Madame Jones brings that same energy to class, saying “ I sing, I dance, I have games, and I always have energy even on my hard days. I have a great sense of humor, and change my activities frequently and relate them to something in the real world, so the students never expect the same thing; they’ll always have a different experience”. But what most students don’t realize is how difficult it can be to manage a classroom. “We, as teachers, have to meet the students where they’re at and take their skills, personality, and mood into account, to be able to encourage them to reach their goals and get real world skills, while also reading a thousand emails, and grading a million papers…every day”, and that’s before considering what’s going on in their own lives.
Before Madame Jones was a French teacher she wanted to be a lawyer or a diplomat, otherwise she would just ride her pony all day every day. When asked about what led to the decision to become a teacher instead of a horse diplomat, she said, “I started volunteering in a French classroom senior year and my teacher told me to take her small French 3 class to the library and teach them. She handed me a book and after teaching them, one of the students came up to me at the end of the class and said ‘I have never learned so much in any of my other French classes’, so I was like, huh, maybe I should do this”. And just as students inspired her to go into teaching, seeing student progress continues to motivate Madame Jones every day.
Madame Jones’s advice to future students taking French is “The more you listen, speak, and read outside of class in areas that interest you the better you’re going to get.” One thing she wishes more students understood about learning a language is it takes time and dedication, but anyone can do it if they want to.
