If you are in my class, you will automatically
receive my respect and my attention. I am interested in you as a human being,
not just as a name in ebear. To both language and literature classes, I bring
my own passions—just being able to speak French and read great books everyday
makes me happy—but I aim, also, to be a detached facilitator and to help you
find your own reasons to study French or Comp. Lit. In language classes, I
attempt to draw on students’ linguistic intuition as much as possible by
creating what I call invisible structures based on a cyclical model of
learning (You may not see why we suddenly turn to a given topic, but your
brain may well!). Language classes should not be painful and, while I insist
upon hard work and regular grammar exercises for homework, I try to create
classes that allow students to experience the progress they are making and to
put their knowledge of a foreign language to use. My pedagogy owes much to my
training by Dr. Marlies Mueller (Harvard University), an expert at bringing
language teaching to life and whose high standards I strive to meet. I take
particular interest in working with students who, previously, have not
particularly enjoyed French classes--nothing makes me happier than helping a
student who hated French at the start of the semester not only improve their
grade but also find pleasure in French, decide to go to Paris in the summer,
etc. In literature classes, my goal is on creating a dialogue with texts and
films, on forging connections that may be unexpected, on stepping away from
the beaten path. I believe that there are always two main responsibilities in
a literature class: 1) to constantly refine one’s ability to analyze a text or
film in great detail (Why this tense? Why that image? Why zeugma? Why etc?);
and 2) to engage with the consequences of such analysis on the level of ideas
and concepts. These two skills are very different, but both are essential in
order to create pertinent and intellectually justified connections between languages, traditions, and geographical and historical
situations. Thus, sometimes I may make use of the very
French ‘explication de texte’ method; other times, we may have a group discussion
that darts back and forth between post-modern film and Latin philology. In any case, my central goal is to keep curious, to share my own curiosity, and to engage the curiosity of my students.