Teach teenagers from the only public high school for the arts in Massachusetts, the Boston Arts Academy (BAA), French, as well as Francophone culture, with a highlight on your background cultures, since France is rich with multicuturalism and diversity. You happily agreed to take the responsibility of teaching them, and you wilfully endorsed the role of Ambassadors for your school and country. BAA students, in turn, endorsed the same responsibility of teaching you English as well as American culture which is a melting pot of many other cultures from all over the globe.
This translated into a regular email correspondence where you alternately wrote each other in French and English to be able to teach and learn at the same time: you did an amazing job at teaching my BAA students about the French schooling system, the French Revolution, the abolition of the Death Penalty in France, the meaning of the Armistice in France, the freedom fighters who fought for Liberty and Equality (such as Guy Moquet, jean Moulin, Aimé Césaire, Toussaint Louverture, Josephine Baker...), the French trends in fashion, music, art, etc.
My BAA students taught you about their favorite Holiday (= in US English, a Holiday is "jour férié" and not "vacances"): Halloween, Kwanzaa (a weeklong African American celebration which honors universal African heritage and culture), Thanksgiving, etc. They told you what the background story of Thanksgiving was and shared with you what they thought about it; they also told you what kind of food they eat then. For Black History Month, they told you about who their black personality was and what they did (Rosa Parks, Harriet Tubman, the Little Rock Nine, Emmett Till, W.E.B. Dubois, Malcolm X, Tommie Smith,...). They created identity projects to introduce themselves and tell you about their school, their family, their tastes in music and arts (you have a few samples in this blog).
You, Manet students, did an outstanding job with Mrs. Tazi at gathering all these pieces of information to turn them into an Anglophone newspaper so as to share your learning with the rest of the school, and fund raise money in order to pay for the expenses of the trip: because you knew from the start that the idea was for you to turn these virtual exchanges into live interaction.
And you did it! Now, day 3 of the program was a landmark (=major step) in the trip, because you were going to eventually meet with your pen pals.
I cannot find the words to tell you how eager and excited they were at your coming to BAA.
Ms. Torres, BAA's co-Headmaster, Ms. O'Halloran who did an oustanding job at preparing your visit at BAA, and BAA's academic Dean, Ms. Clark, who is in charge of implementing the academic curriculum (=programme scolaire) of the school, were expecting you, together with seven government students (= délégués du lycée).
From left to right: Leica, Xavier, Ashard, Roobvia, Najah, Darisel and Wilne
You met your pen pals from the first and second semesters (all of you had at least two pen pals for each semester because French class is taught along semesters, five days a week, one hour and a half for each class, which corresponds to a year of world language class in France), and you were paired with a pen pal with whom you shadowed: in BAA language, a shadow (=ombre) is a pen pal who stays with you in class all day long.
After greeting each other, you followed your pen pal to class and spent your first day ever in an American high school.
A typical day at BAA is either from 8:00 a.m. to 2:30 p.m. if you’re a dance or a VA (Visual Arts) major, or from 9:30 a.m. to 4:00 p.m. if you’re a theater or a music major.
Your first class was... French, and you got to teach French to your American friends. You all took your mission very seriously and were very proud to tutor your pen pals. They were also really excited to get to put into practice the things they had learned in French and show you how much they knew already.
Then, after a very productive class, we went to Advisory. Advisory takes place twice a week, on Mondays and Fridays. Advisory is like our “Vie de classe”. Each advisory is lead by an Advisor (a teacher), who has about twelve advisees (students) from the same major (either dance, music, theater or VA). The advisees stay in the same advisory throughout their high school years, so that the newly-arrived Freshmen replace the leaving Seniors and can be guided and tutored by the older ones. Whenever a student has a problem, he/she may report to his/her advisor, who would be like a head teacher in a French school.
Here, you can see one of my favourite colleagues, Mr. McLaughlin, the dance teacher with whom I share the advisory (mostly to get an idea of how an advisory works, because most of the times, the advisee is me and not the students… :p).
And then, we went to the school cafeteria and perfectly merged into American teenage school life. It was hard to tell the French students from the American ones.
And you got an idea of what school food tastes like. When there was no pizza left, we had peanut butter and jelly sandwiches… New experience.
School lunch is only 25 minutes at BAA, so we had to quickly get back to class.
Some got to see a hum class (or humanities: histoire-géo)
Others got to take a biology class
Or a science class
... a maths class
... a music class
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... or even a dance class
You had a lot of exciting things to say about the school. We would very much like to post some on the blog, so be sure to email me with your notes please.
At the end of the school day, some of you left the school and went back home with their pen pals to get a full immersion into a typical American household.
Bonus: French class
