I learned this week of the death of Margaret Munns, my French teacher for all four years of high school. Madame Munns lived to the age of 100, and was already 66 when I graduated in 1988. I gather she retired shortly after that. She was an outstanding teacher and I was very fortunate to have learned from her for so long. I owe her an enormous debt of gratitude for giving me the foundations for what has become a great source of pleasure to me for many years.
Madame Munns was traditional in her teaching. We students sat in rows of desks facing forward, occasionally turning to our left or right for conversations with other students. I believe her class room was all French all the time, at least at the upper levels. I don’t recall what grammar textbooks we used, but there were daily exercises for homework and chalk-talk lectures to review sticky points. There were weekly vocabulary words to learn as well as irregular verb conjugations to memorize. We had frequent quizzes and tests to study for; we seldom went to the school’s “language lab”, which was little more than a collection of two dozen tape recorders.
But alongside the dryer stuff, we worked with real French texts. We read the 1840 novel Colomba by Prosper Mérimée, which featured rough Corsicans and introduced me to the history of Bonaparte’s Hundred Days return from exile. We read the 1923 play Knock ou le Triomphe de la médecine by Jules Romains. I delighted in Dr Knock’s shyster conman bit even as I was totally lost by the extended Act I description of Dr Parpalaid’s fancy automobile. We read Albert Camus’s 1942 novel L’Étranger in French class a full year before we were assigned to read it in translation in English class. I didn’t understand the notion of existential epiphany in either language. We read En attendant Godot, whose symbolism I understood better, but whose Russian-named characters I couldn’t keep straight. (We also read Émile et les détectives, which I only later learned was a translation from the German).
Madame Munns did not present as a “warm fuzzy” to her students in my era (though perhaps I wasn’t the most attuned observer of emotional communication), but I have three memories that make it clear she was looking out for me personally. I was a strong student in 9th grade, and so was surprised when some scheduling error caused me to be assigned to Madame Munns’s less-advanced French class in 10th grade. I discussed this with her on the first day of class. She agreed that it was an error that we would get fixed, but that in the meantime I should join the class until it got sorted out.
I listened as she started the first day’s lesson with a review of some basics: colors, days of the week, classroom objects. I confess I was feeling rather superior to these duffers who couldn’t remember cahier or crayon, and I imagine my face showed it when she called on one student to come up to the front of the class to count aloud from one to ten. When the boy had finished, she asked if anyone could count the next ten numbers. My hand shot up, and I strutted to the front, eager to show that I was clearly in the wrong class. No sooner had I started than I realized that after a summer off I couldn’t recall what came after «Onze, douze, treize, … ». «… quarante ?» I ventured. Madame Munns frowned. «Dix-quatre?». Eventually she supplied me the missing «quatorze» and I made it up to vingt without further incident.
Madame Munns didn’t say anything particular that I recall, but I distinctly remember a look she gave me which I interpreted as “Honors class or non-Honors class, I still have things to teach young man”. Did she know that those pesky numbers in the teens range are hard to navigate, and easy to forget over a break? Did she pick me for that item to make a point? I’ll never know, but the incident took me down a peg and stayed with me when my schedule was corrected a few days later.
The second episode I recall came just a few weeks later. Madame Munns had arranged for her AP students, seniors all, to subscribe to a French pedagogical newspaper aimed at an American high school audience. The paper came out weekly and was delivered in bulk to French teachers around the country. I was still in 10th grade, two years off from AP French, but Madame Munns took me aside and asked me if I’d like to subscribe as well. I did, and for the next two years I would stop by her desk once a week at the end of class and quietly pick up my personal copy of the paper. I believe I was on the only non-AP student who did this. I would read it over the course of the week, in class after I had finished a desk assignment, in a free period, at home, whenever. I read basic stories of French politics and culture, stories about happenings in the major cities of France, and news of the wider Francophone world. Even with the language and content tailored for teenagers, this was hard going for me. But I drew a lot of confidence from the fact that Madame Munns had picked me out as a student who was ready for this challenge, and I stuck with it as a weekly habit for three years.
The third memory I have of personalized education from Madame Munns took place over several weeks of senior year. It wasn’t part of the AP French curriculum, but somehow I ended up reading Le Rouge et le Noir by Stendahl. I don’t recall our school library having a lot of other French language books, but surprisingly this one was on the shelf, unabridged, in the original French. I read a few chapters each week and buffered up questions to ask Madame Munns about parts I didn’t understand. We met informally once or twice a month and she explained to me the things I was missing, both idiomatic expressions and cultural background. This was well before the World Wide Web of course, so the personal attention was invaluable.
I never spoke to Madame Munns again after graduation. I don’t know why, really, it just didn’t seem like a thing one could do. I was in a hurry to get out of town and put Worcester behind me, and my high school teachers were part of Worcester. I know I felt proud when I learned over the summer, post-graduation, that I’d gotten a top score on my French AP exam, and prouder still of the reaction I got four years later from a French cabbie on my first visit to Paris. I chatted with the driver during a ride, and at some point he asked me what part of Canada I was from. He then absolutely refused to believe I was from America – no Americans spoke French that fluently. I thought of sharing experiences of that first trip with Madame Munns when I got home, but she had retired by then and tracking down former teachers just wasn’t in my lexicon.
I wish I had thought to reconnect with her at some point in these past 10 years of my renewed interested in French studies. Her family says that Madame Munns was intellectually engaged and active right through her 100 years, and I read in her obituary that she did in fact keep up with a number of her former students. I would have enjoyed comparing stories of French travels with her and perhaps doing French crossword puzzles together. As it is, I can only write this posthumous remembrance of her and share it with the world.
Madame Munns inscribed my yearbook with the dedication «David, tu me manqueras. Meilleurs voeux, M. Munns». Even though I have not been in contact with her for the past 34 years, elle me manque aussi. Merci mille fois, Madame Munns.