On a sunny day after school, Madame Bahr still sat at her desk hard at work. Her friendly smile radiates almost as much as her love for language. She is one of the newest teachers enlisted here in the Lin-Wood school system. Her room is between Ms. Shamey’s and Mrs. Whitcher’s rooms, if one wanted to stop by to say “bonjour!”


Q: What kind of student were you in high school?

A: I was a very good student. ... I was pretty conscientious about my learning and I took very good notes. People were constantly asking if they could borrow my notes and it got annoying. So I messed up my handwriting because I’m passive aggressive like that. People stopped asking because they couldn’t read them. I used to make detailed study guides for tests and I had outlines for everything!


Q: When did you find your love for language?

A: When I was a little kid, my mother started to teach me French. She would put vocabulary cards all around the house so she would label things like “table,” “desk,” “lamp,” “stove,” and then I would go around the room and, well she’d label them first. I would study them and go around the house and put the cards [in French] around the house and she’d check my answers, so I had a little bit of homeschooling from a very young age and that’s what started ... my love of language.

And then when I was a little bit older, my cousin and I actually practiced French together because we didn’t want our brothers to know what we were saying so it was like our secret language. ... [U]sually people learn language because they want to communicate with other people. We started because we didn’t want to communicate with people!

 Q: Are you a cat or a dog person?

A: I have one cat and one dog and so I don’t take sides.

Q: What college did you originally want to go to? 

A: For my undergraduate ... studies, I went to Wheaton College in northern Mass[achusettes], and I majored in French studies there. ... Wheaton is a part of a 12 college exchange, so I also took courses at Brown and ... I did a study abroad program in France, so I was in Paris the first semester of my junior year.  And that was through la Sorbonne Junior France Program. ... I took half of my courses at the Sweet Briar school and half of my courses at [a school] in Paris. So that was undergraduate. And then I did my Master’s a Plymouth State University. ... While I was there, I took a course at McGill, in Montreal.


Q: Is there any questions you would like to be asked?

A: Usually people ask me where I lived in France....


Q: Where did you live in France?

A: I lived in Paris for a semester in college. ... Somewhere after my junior year of college, I did an internship in Avignon, which is in the south of France.... Following my graduation at Wheaton, I lived in Charolles, which is a really small town in ... Burgundy, France ... and I was there for a year teaching English.

* Update: I'm sorry for the misspellings, Madame Bahr!