Andie Carroll, Reporter
@acarrollCourant
Picture this: you are in the Middle East, riding camels in Jordan, taking cruises down the Nile, and then, suddenly you are in a small suburban town in Connecticut. The new French teacher, Mark Foster, was expecting this transition to be a tough one; however he was surprisingly mistaken.
After spending a few years in Jordan teaching French, Dr. Foster moved back to his hometown in Connecticut where he attended school at the University of Connecticut. “When my wife and I moved back from Jordan, we said it was going to be really hard to teach American students because Jordanian students are as polite as you could possibly imagine”.
However, with almost a semester of the school year over, Dr. Foster is finding the transition from the Jordanian students to the students at New Canaan much easier than he thought it would be. “I have yet to teach a class when the kids have not said thank you at the end of a lesson,” he said. “They’re insanely polite here.”
His decision to travel to Jordan and teach there was a new adventure for him and his wife in a part of the world they are not familiar with. Upon their arrival, they had to embrace the new culture and language. “My kids were grown and out of the house, so I thought I would do something exciting and I thought it would be interesting to go somewhere where I had to learn the language”, he said. “I wanted to experience that frustration when people were talking too fast or expected me to know the language, so my wife and I picked the Middle East.”
However, Dr. Foster could not master Arabic like he mastered the other four languages he is fluent in. “My Arabic is pretty terrible. It’s just not as friendly a language,” he said. “I speak Italian fluently, I am almost fluent in Spanish, I speak Occitan, and obviously I am fluent in French.”
Dr. Foster has excited the school with his Harry Potter collection that is displayed in the back of his colorful classroom. He started it by accident when one of his students told him to read the Harry Potter series. He bought the book at first in French, but because some of the words were too weird, he bought it in English. “Then one of my students brought back a Swedish one, and when I traveled to Italy and bought it in Italian my collection began,” he said.
Dr. Foster buys a new book whenever he visits a new country, or when his friends and family travel somewhere and bring him back a book. “Everywhere I go I buy a Harry Potter book in that language,” he said. “ I have been to 32 countries so every time I travel to a new one, I drag my wife to a bookstore to look for the book.”
The World Language Administrator, Lizette D’Amico, is excited to have Dr. Foster as the new french teacher at NCHS. She says he has already begun to impact the school district with his approach to teaching. “He has high energy and excitement. He’s not just about French, but actually teaching students,” she said. “He really believes in engaging kids rather than just having them read out of a textbook and memorize words.”
Dr. Foster has set goals for the language program at NCHS. “I want to have a language be something different here. I want language to become something that you don’t do for three years so colleges will think you’re cool,” he said.
Looking to the future of the language program, Dr. Foster has begun to think about planning a trip in the coming years. “I would like to have a program where people expect that they are going to go overseas do and exchange, stay with a family, and study in a French school while they are there,” he said. “A language should be a part of your high school that you really remember as a life changing thing.”
