A Gallery of French Teachers

 

This the last entry in my series about 1960s educational experiments in the Fayetteville-Manlius School District.

It is well known now that very young children have a greater capacity for learning languages than older children or adults.  In response to this, F-M instituted a pilot program to teach French to my fifth grade class. We were the first, last, and only fifth graders in the history of Pleasant Street Elementary to have a French teacher. They closed out the program behind us.  Perhaps by 1968 they had figured out that at age ten, we were already too old to benefit from the early exposure. Despite my taking French from fifth through tenth grades, I had no command of French vocabulary or idioms, and forgot most of it by the time I got out of high school. Ifreshman year at Syracuse University, I knew one too many tenses to qualify for a course at my vocabulary level, and was placed in a French literature course. I passed it only on the second try, and only because I sneakily read everything in translation. My professor told me, "If I didn't speak English, I wouldn't be able to tell what you're trying to say in French." So much for the efficacy of the "early" exposure to French!

So we had French in fifth grade, sixth grade, and seventh grade, and those three years added up to French I. Eighth and ninth grades were French II, and tenth grade was French III. French was the only foreign language available to us, not just in elementary school but in junior high as well. Of course it was French: we were a couple of hours from Canada on Route 81.  The closest province was Ontario, but Quebec was right next door to that. High school also offered Latin and Spanish, and possibly German and Italian, but by then I didn't want to start over with a new language.  Little did I know that someday I'd be living an hour away from Mexico, in a city where nearly all the streets have Spanish names, Calle this and Camino that.

I don't remember the name of my fifth grade French teacher, but she was from Quebec. I remember feeling a little cheated about this, on the grounds that Canadian French was probably to Parisian French as American English was to BBC English (not that I'd ever heard of the BBC, in those days).  Why couldn't we learn real French from a real French person? It was pointed out to me, however, that we were much more likely to interact with people from Quebec, anyway, so what was the harm?

As it turns out, I didn't have a single teacher from France in six years of French classes at F-M. I don't think any of them were even from Canada, after fifth grade. But they were an interesting and cosmopolitan bunch.

My seventh grade French teacher, Anthony (Tony) Procopio, used to be in plays with my mom.  I think he was in Mom's 1968 revue, They'd Rather Be Right. He may have had a brother who also was involved in amateur theater, but then again I could be confusing him with someone else on that point. In any case, Mr. Procopio was a good-natured guy who played the guitar and sang, albeit not usually in class! Based on my Googling, nowadays Mr. Procopio may or may not be a) a clerk of court in Syracuse b) a high school principal, or c) retired and still living in Central New York. I liked him a lot.

Dr. Bogoev (A. C. Dimov-Bogoev) my French teacher in eighth grade, was a serious, diffident man. He's the one who renamed me Geneviève for class, on the grounds that the name Karen didn't have a French equivalent. I later took Genevieve as my confirmation name. I didn't make much of a connection with Dr. Bogoev, despite being in his homeroom in eighth grade.

A Google search on Dr. Bogoev is far more revealing than one on Mr. Procopio. The name appears to be Bulgarian, which makes him the most exotic of my French teachers, even before you consider his literary offerings. He published a monograph, Bibliografia sobre las islas Malvinas, in Buenos Aires in 1952.  In the 1980s he co-wrote and co-edited a multilingual anthology with the intriguing title Eurasia Nostratica: Festschrift fur Karl Heinrich Menges.  The man got around!  On the whole, though, I'd rather order my ninth grade social studies teacher's book about New York State place names. (Hi, Mr. Farrell!)

My ninth grade French teacher was Mme. Karen Levine.  For years I'd been struggling to be called by the nickname Casey, but succeeded only in being called that by Joel and my seventh grade social studies teacher, Thomas Murphy Hennigan.  Mr. Hennigan pronouced it K. C., in keeping with my first and middle initials at the time. Two years later, however, I liked Mme. Levine so much that I decided the name Karen was okay after all. 

The most memorable of all my French teachers, though, was my Dutch French teacher. I had her for sixth grade French.

Her name was Mademoiselle Djykstra, or possibly Dyjkstra.  I don't know whether I ever knew her first name. I don't have a picture of her, and I've found no trace of her online. She was from Holland, obviously, and once mentioned hiding from the Nazis. She was young and blonde and pretty and nice. But what I remember best about her was an incident that happened outside of school in early 1969.

I don't remember which of the kids I was friends with that year came up with the idea of having a birthday party at an ice skating rink in Dewitt, near the members-only department store GEM. It may even have been my party, but I don't think so. Despite my clumsiness, I liked indoor ice skating a lot. After that, I got one of my parents to drop me off at the rink every couple of weeks until the novelty wore off.  What I liked best was that skaters were allowed to choose the music for the P.A. from the rink's small record collection.  I always put on the Beatles, either The Early Beatles or, if memory serves, Something New, possibly Beatles '65.

One Saturday afternoon at the rink, I saw someone that I knew - a teacher! This was something that almost never happened when I was in elementary school.  Except for Judy Finch, who starred in a local production of The Sound of Music, we never saw teachers outside of school. (Miss Finch wasn't my fifth grade teacher, but Paula Olsen's. Paula beat me out for the role of Gretel, and rightly so. My mom played one of the nuns.)

Anyway, back to the rink. I looked up, and there was Mlle. Djykstra! Skating! With a man!  She was out on a date!

I don't remember who said hello first, me or Mlle. Djykstra. She was very nice about it.  She even introduced me to the guy.  I don't remember the name, but he was big and handsome, either African or African American, long before that term came into vogue. He was very nice, too. He offered to teach me to skate better while Mlle. Djykstra took a break. I accepted.  I think the gist of his lesson was the idea that I should skate on one foot at a time, not both.

Remember, this was the late 1960s, and I was a naive, somewhat sheltered sixth grader from an all-white school. I was surprised to see my French teacher in a public place, surprised to see her on a date, and surprised that her date would take the time to be so gracious to me.  The fact that they were an interracial (and international!) couple was just one part of the whole surprising incident.  But it was a wonderful moment for me, simply because an adult, a stranger who happened to know one of my teachers, took fifteen minutes to teach me to skate.

Karen