When Executive Chef Ken Sligar first received a Facebook message in 2021 from someone claiming to be his half-brother in France, he knew one thing right away: he had to learn French. “That sort of inspired me, and I’ve always loved the French food and the culture and all that,” he said. “I think it’s good to continue to learn languages — even an old guy like me.”
Sligar fell in love with Paris when he visited his half-brother in 2023 and has since tried to master the language. He uses Babbel (a language learning platform), listens to French podcasts during his commute to school and watches the latest French movies available on Netflix.
However, Sligar’s desire to improve his French didn’t end there; starting last school year, he began meeting with French teacher Marie-Andrée Roy-Sajja. “She always would make time, one day every week or every other week during lunch period,” he said. “She’d come back here [for] about 20 to 25 minutes. […] She’d give me homework and leave me projects to work on.”
Sligar met Roy-Sajja in one of his cooking classes for the middle school foreign language classes. Besides engaging in casual conversation with Sligar to improve his conversational skills, Roy-Sajja gives Sligar food-related homework and activities. “She had photos of different foods with the names, and I would have to put together sentences, whether it be a croissant or a baguette or whatever it was on there, and then talk to her about it,” Sligar said. “She was really focused on me trying to have a conversation, learning to speak and [being] confident in speaking.”
At first, Sligar felt self-conscious about his French-speaking skills, but Roy-Sajja was determined to change that. “I was always very careful in speaking because I didn’t want to really insult somebody or whatever,” he said. “So she said, ‘Get over that. Let’s do it. You’re going to make mistakes. You’ll say it wrong, but we’ll figure it out.’”
Meeting with Sligar ignites Roy-Sajja’s passion for teaching and reminds her that language ultimately unites people. “French is our common ingredient,” she said. “Food and language are both meant to be shared, and it’s really bringing us together over connection. I think a very well-seasoned dish, just like a great sentence in French, can both be small victories that we enjoy.”
Sligar’s love for the French language has also sparked an unlikely friendship with another teacher on campus: science teacher Alexis King, also a French speaker. “Every Friday, I box up a couple of chocolate croissants for her, one for her daughter and one for her, and I usually write a little note on the box in French on there for her,” he said.
Sligar’s friendship with King is just one example of faculty connecting through a shared love of language. Science teacher James Dann and history teacher Charles Hanson met years ago while playing the board game Diplomacy amongst other faculty, and have bonded over their passion for French ever since. “I love it when Charles comes to speak to me in French, for example, or another language, because it’s like we have this secret little code, and it’s just fun,” Dann said.
Dann learned French the hard way while he participated in a particle physics experiment in France, his teacher tapping a burning cigarette on his table to communicate the meaning of “cendrier” (ashtray). Hanson explained that the different ways they acquired French — he learned at school with textbooks and side-by-side English translations — resulted in different skills. “It’s like, I am a musician who reads music well, but Dr. Dann is a musician who can improvise,” Hanson said.
Dann and Hanson believe that some phrases can be better expressed in French than English, and weave these into conversation often. “You have a situation, and there’s just a perfect way to express it in French,” Dann said. “Even if we’re speaking English, then you could just throw that French expression in there, and we just keep going.”
While Hanson and Dann enjoy each other’s company regardless, their love for the French language adds another playful dimension to their friendship. “I like him for other reasons, but two musicians, serious musicians, tend to enjoy the company of musicians,” Hanson said. “Serious athletes enjoy the company of fellow athletes. It’s a fun thing to talk about and experience together.”
Another friend of Hanson’s, Latin and English teacher Tom Garvey, enjoys Hanson’s playful passion for languages. “I think that my biggest partner in crime here is Dr. Hanson as a fellow, just nerd in general,” Garvey said. “We share a lot of jokes and share a lot of common languages. Our unwritten rule: leave no pun unsaid.”
Garvey is a consummate traveler — having visited 85 countries before COVID-19 — and his linguistic repertoire includes being able to speak and read nine languages with varying degrees of facility: English, Spanish, German, Italian, Portuguese, French, Latin and both ancient and modern Greek. He can also read a little Sanskrit, the ancient South Asian language that modern Hindi and Urdu developed from.
As a linguistics enthusiast, Garvey’s motivation for learning new languages isn’t driven by practicality per se. “It’s not necessarily the applications of the learning of languages that matter so much to me as just being interested in how the things fit together,” he said. “I think there’s something beautiful about just pursuing knowledge for knowledge’s sake.”
