Emilie Darbois hates sneakers. Really, really hates them.
“They’re terrible. And I felt like I had to go buy some just so I could fit in here. It was a painful experience,” she said.
Ms. Darbois is the French language intern at Wabash. Originally from Burgundy, France, she has lived in Paris for the last four years. She is a graduate of Sorbonne, with the French equivalent of a bachelor’s degree in English.
Unlike the other three interns, Ms. Darbois is not a Fulbright Scholar. The Fulbright Scholarships are not available in France; Ms. Darbois applied through the Foreign Language Teaching Assistant Program, an arm of the Fulbright Program. She chose Wabash because she lived in Valparaiso, Indiana for three years as a child. She wanted to return to see what it was like from an adult’s perspective.
Her main responsibility is teaching tutorials for French 101 and 201. In these tutorial sessions, she tries to get her students to look at the language and culture from a French perspective. She also tries to bring in current events and, of course, she has the students practice the language. “I don’t want them to be boring,” she said, “so what I try to do is get a mix of what’s boring – grammar, conjugation, and stuff, and then reading for pronunciation, and then either current events or the way things are in France, and why they are the way they are.”
Apart from teaching, Ms. Darbois is also taking German 201 with Dr. Tucker and Post- Colonial Literature with Dr. Brewer- Szczeszak. She hopes to one day teach English in France. She wants to revitalize the teaching of the language by implementing American teaching styles. In France, English is a required course that many students find dull.
“It’s all just memorize, conjugate, memorize, conjugate - very boring,” she said. “I want to change that, so students are interested in the language itself.” Ms. Darbois is greatly inspired by Dr. Tucker’s German 201 class, which she says is “awesome.”
“Everything is very easy to do because the school supports the students completely,” she said.
“There’re lots of things to do at any time. The students have a lot of autonomy.”
She also likes that everyone seems to know everyone else. “Coming from a big university to a small college, it’s a very nice change,” said Darbois.
Her favorite thing about America - and Crawfordsville in particular - is that the people are welcoming.
“Our neighbor sent us this huge welcome basket with all this food in it – there were French cookies, Argentinean wine, some different American foods, German cookies and Spanish spiced ham,” she said, “It was great. I’ve lived in the same apartment in Paris for four years and I still don’t know all of my neighbors.”
Like most of the other interns, Ms. Darbois does not have an affinity for American beer.
“Of course, the beer is very bad,” she said. “It doesn’t have a bad taste, it just doesn’t have any taste. It’s like yellow water. And light beer is just weird. It’s just a totally new concept for me.”
Ms. Darbois speaks English better than many American students, but there are some words and expressions she can’t quite grasp. Among these is the expression “Sweet!” She also has difficulty coming up with responses to the question “What’s up?”
Her least favorite thing about America are the sneakers. “I felt like I had to buy sneakers just to fit in, so I could work out, because that’s what everyone seems to do here, and it was very hard,” she said. “I had to start exercising because there is no need to walk here, which I do in Paris two or three hours a day, so I had to go exercise in the gym, which is very, very, very boring.”
The worst change she had to make was learning to be on time.
“In France, everyone is at least a few minutes late to everything,” she said. “Teachers are late to class, even. It’s expected. But here, I’ve got to be on time all the time. It’s a hard change to make. I’ve always got to keep an eye on the clock.”