My mom went to kindergarten in Detroit, Michigan in the 1950s, and she attended what I think was one of the earliest examples of dual-immersion school. After a few years, her family moved to a new town, and she went to regular school after that, but the seeds of francophilia were sown in our family. My mom loved France and told me so many stories about the summer she spent on a high school exchange in Dijon, France. My childhood pet was a cat named Ma Petite. When I started junior high and could take a foreign language, there was no question that I would take anything but French. 

 

I studied French in junior high, high school, and college, for just long enough to get cocky and think that I had mastered the language. I got a summer internship in Belgium the summer after my sophomore year of college, and when I landed in Belgium, I quickly realized how much I didn’t know. I attended Brigham Young University, a school owned by the LDS church. I worked at a grocery store, and I expected my time at work to feel culturally unfamiliar, and it did. I also went to church at the local LDS congregation. I expected that my church experience would feel more like home. I was surprised when I kept making cultural gaffes. For example, the members of the congregation there all go around and greet each other and give the bise (kiss each other on the cheeks) before the service starts, which I was not expecting and did not initially participate in. When I was asked to speak for five minutes in a church service, I was very surprised when I was asked to sit down after seven minutes, a difference of time which would have been acceptable to go over at home. Although the lessons, songs, and course materials were the same, they were used differently. For example, the pacing of the hymns was different. 

 

My first reaction to the church experience in Belgium (and I was twenty, so I recognize it was probably not the most mature or enlightened reaction) was, “Why are they doing this wrong here?” I had been attending church for years, and I knew how it was supposed to be, and this was not it! Instead of feeling the most like home, church was the place that felt the most foreign because it was full of cultural practices that were just different enough to make them feel very strange. If I had been more adept at the language and been in a position of influence, I think that I might have tried to change what was happening in the congregation in Belgium to make it more similar to what happened at home. Instead, not in a position of influence and with limited skills, I gradually came to see that the practices there were awesome in their own ways (I mean, who doesn’t want the meeting to end on time?). 

 

I taught French for a year right out of college, and then I moved to another state and another career. Eighteen years later, my kids’ junior high was trying to find a French teacher, and it coincided with my youngest getting ready for kindergarten. I ended up taking the job, and needed to recertify, which meant I had to take a Praxis and an Oral Proficiency Interview within my first year, and I immersed myself as much as was possible, consuming only French media, working with a tutor, and eventually passing both tests with great results. 

 

That spring, I traveled to France again and somehow I was still so naive. I was so offended when everyone in Paris immediately switched to English when they heard my accent. Over the last eight years in the classroom, my proficiency and accent have gotten even better, and now I realize that there is so much I don’t know. I will never be a native speaker. I will never be a cultural native. As a result, I feel like someone who is looking through the window on the French experience, but can never be part of it. 

 

My students like to watch the “Real or Cake” videos on YouTube. Sometimes I feel like I am one of those videos. I can look French. I can know more (intellectually) about French literature or art than many French people, but inside, I’m not real. I’m always going to be American cake.