#memorablemomentsineducation #28:
Yesterday, I woke from a dream in which someone was speaking fluent French, and I understood almost every word of it. What does that say about my brain and what it has retained over the years? More than we ever realize.
Right after I graduated from high school, I traveled to France on an educational tour with my teacher and several classmates. I remember Madame Swetz telling us we might end up dreaming in French if we were lucky and immersed enough in the experience. I’m not sure I reached that pinnacle, but I do recall rich moments from that trip 25 years ago!
We traveled on a large bus with two other school groups from other parts of the U.S. One of the other teachers, a man who reportedly married a real live Frenchwoman, had the worst French accent I’ve ever heard. He would stand at the front of the bus and bark out instructions or information in a butchered form of the language I’d come to love. I even invented a sentence where I would mock his Midwestern drawl superimposed on lovely French phrases by saying it to my friends: “J’ai perdu mes cartes postales a huit heures moin le quart.” God, I can be quite the snob…I suppose that explains my affinity for the French in the first place!
On that journey, I also made a new friend, Eliza, whose parents mailed her care packages while we were gone. I’ll never forget her sharing a newspaper clipping from her mom that included book reviews for books she might like. I’m sure at the time I thought, what kind of mom is this? Who takes the time to cut out reviews and send them to her kid who’s going to be gone for just three weeks? But I remembered one of those books, and years later when I became a teacher at an alternative school, I sought out the title–Daniel Pennac’s Better Than Life–because he tells the story of trying to reach at-risk youth in Paris through literature. The book became a foundation for my teaching philosophy. If you’ve ever seen a list of the 10 Rights of the Reader, then you know his work as the rights were first introduced there.
Don’t ask why I’m discussing this particular moment now, but I just love to know there’s a bit of serendipity to learning. Sometimes learning is built on being in the right place at the right time, open to the novelty of experience.