Two years ago today, 50 students at Harding Avenue Elementary School stayed behind at the day’s end and streamed single-file into their first French Club gathering. The teachers themselves were students; seven undergraduates from Virginia Tech prepared their first lesson on French greetings for weeks prior. In most contexts, this would have been a typical scene of community service in a typical college town. But the tragic shooting that took 32 lives at the Virginia Tech campus just months before made Blacksburg anything but a typical college town and this was no typical service project.
Virginia Tech student Heidi Miller was shot while in her French class on April 16, 2007. Working with the children in the Teach for Madame program has been a way for her to recover emotionally and remember her French professor.
Each of the seven students who came to teach that day was profoundly motivated by a teacher they once had, Jocelyne Couture-Nowak, or simply “Madame.” Madame was among the 32 victims who died on April 16, 2007, and her students pledged their time and effort to continuing her legacy of teaching French and service to the community. Weeks into their lessons, both “teachers” and students understood that everyone was learning more than French verbs and culture. Perhaps learning more about reaching out to others, simple things we took for granted before 4/16, and coping in its aftermath.
Every lesson taught has been a lesson learned since that first French Club gathering two years ago. Not just for those founding seven students, most who have graduated by now, but for everyone who has come into our program. Today, we have nearly 40 students engaged in the community every week across three elementary schools in Blacksburg, reaching approximately 200 children. Millions of people who have read about our work in the mass media have regarded this as somewhat of a “happy ending” to a terrible tragedy. All of this of course was put in motion by one person, Madame, not in her death but by her life.
Click here to read the Roanoke Times article that captured one of our first lessons in February, 2008.