Recently, I transitioned from six years teaching at Carthage College to secondary education. From 1989 to 1991, I lived in Montpellier, France. Those two years nurtured in me a love for the French language and francophone culture. This led me to earn a M.A. in French Translation and Linguistics from Kent State University in 1994. For a year, I worked as an Executive Assistant in a French chemical heat exchanger company in the Cleveland area. In 2001, my husband and I moved to Milwaukee as I began my doctoral program. While researching for my dissertation, I worked with a French monk who had translated a key text from Greek to French. This renewed my love for French and a while later, my desire to earn my teaching license in French and ESL. I'm thrilled to be teaching at Tosa East because of the excellence of the student body, the collaborative nature of the district's world language teachers, and the opportunity to increase awareness of the vast French speaking world outside of continental France along with the joy of learning French!