It's all about the niños

I've just made it home, totally exhausted, after French Fair Day. Each year, BYU hosts what I have heard rumors to be some of the largest foreign language fairs in the country for school kids. Students of Chinese, French, German, Japanese, Russian, and Spanish gather in different parts of campus to present skits, songs, and poems, compete in trivia and spelling competitions, and to speak the languages they are learning with thousands of other students from across northern Utah.

My day started at about 5:30 this morning when I got up to hurry to school so I could leave sub plans for the students who wouldn't be attending (I don't take my French I classes--they just get to stew in anticipation for next year while the rest of us take off). After that, the day was a rush of meeting times, permission forms, roll calls, bus rides, passing out handouts, reminders about schedules, digging for the right CD, final rehearsals, calls to the bus driver, and kid-rangling.

This was not my first French Fair experience. This was my second year with students, and I had volunteered as a helper for three years as a BYU student (in addition to one year at the Spanish Fair)--long days of listening to poetry or passing out pastries or checking passports. Even without my own students there, the French Fair days were exhausting.

Talking to my school's Chinese teacher on the bus ride back from the fair, I realized I wasn't the only one who was glad all the rehearsals, memorizing, and transportation arrangements were done for another year. My colleague had her own students to manage while she was at the Chinese fair, but had also been saddled with setting up and running the karaoke booth for the whole fair. During the bus ride, we also chatted about the exchange she's arranged for six years now between her students and a students at a school in Taiwan, as well as the video contest her students enter annually.

As we talked, I thought about the extra time she spends on these projects. If she's like me, like other foreign language teachers I know, like the BYU professors who organize the language fairs, like the college students who make it run, there isn't really anyone thanking her for doing it or noticing that she does. She doesn't get paid more for doing it all. Maybe that makes it all the more amazing that it happens.

One of those organizing BYU professors--of Spanish--sent out emails to the grad students of the department explaining how their help was expected at the language fair. "If you start to feel unmotivated, lethargic or frustrated," he wrote, "just remember, it's all about the niños!" On the bus ride today, I had a moment of such amazement about how many people had taken that to heart during the day. What an amazing thing had come together because of that: hours of preparing students, of careful organization, of listening to and encouraging these learners, of set-up and take-down--all of it fueled by not much more than some good hearts. As I was walking out of work this evening, another colleague stopped me and told me how she had overheard some of my students talking to each other in the hall about how much they had loved the French Fair. That made me want to think it's worth it.