Kennedy: Signal Mountain teacher creates lasting lesson

Contributed photo by Amber Thevenet / Greetja Nestler, an 11th grader at Signal Mountain Middle High School, prepares a get-well card for a child in a French hospital.
Contributed photo by Amber Thevenet / Greetja Nestler, an 11th grader at Signal Mountain Middle High School, prepares a get-well card for a child in a French hospital.

One of the challenges of teaching high school French is making assignments come alive.

That is especially true at Signal Mountain Middle High School, where the curriculum includes immersive fourth and fifth years of French studies under the school's International Baccalaureate program.

Amber Thevenet, who has taught French at Signal Mountain Middle High for seven-plus years, recently found a novel way to connect her students to French-speaking young people overseas.

As an outgrowth of her students' study of a French young-adult novel called "Oscar et la Dame Rose," about an 11-year-old boy who is dying of cancer, Thevenet had her students correspond with children in the pediatric wing of a hospital in Avignon, France.

Thevenet, who has a degree in French from Lee University and is married to a French citizen, lived in France for three years after college before moving back to the United States. Her in-laws in France helped arrange the shipment of get-well wishes that had recently arrived at the Centre Hospitalier d'Avignon.

"At first we were just going to create the cards for the characters in the book, color them, make them pretty," Thevenet said. "Then I was talking to my in-laws: 'I have this idea; I want a real audience. I don't want these cards to fall on deaf ears. I want them to mean something.'"

Thevenet said the book tells the story of Oscar, a boy with advanced cancer, who gains spirituality after an encounter with a hospital volunteer, Mamie-Rose, who steers him to write to God to request spiritual, not temporal, gifts. As a result, each day of his shortened life swells to feel like a decade, and he dies without fear.

"There's two kinds of suffering," Thevenet said the book teaches. "There's moral suffering and physical suffering. Physical suffering you just have to submit to, you experience it. Moral suffering, you choose it. You have no reason to be afraid of death, you choose to be afraid of death."

Thevenet said that by writing well-wishes to sick children her students had the opportunity to curb their suffering - albeit in a small way. She said knowing that a real child in France would receive the words, drawings and coloring pages made the assignment relevant.

"I felt like having a more natural audience made them try harder," Thevenet said. "They're thinking, 'Oh, a real French kid is going to get this, and it's not just for my teacher. They put more effort into it. They wanted it to be correct. They wanted it to be beautiful. They wanted it to be just right. Having the authentic audience is what was key for them."

Thevenet said the students wrote notes sharing elements of their own personalities and decorated the cards with rainbows and flowers. Her parents-in-law added candy and other goodies to each missive, she said.

The teacher said it was the first one-to-one correspondence with French children her students have had since COVID-19 put a lid on pen pal exchanges almost two years ago.

About 30 children in France received the get-well correspondence. Thevenet said her students "geeked out" when they saw photographs of nurses at the French hospital preparing to hand out their packages.

"I absolutely think it was a success," Thevenet said. "It was a more meaningful experience than just reading a book and talking about it."

Life Stories is published on Mondays. Contact Mark Kennedy at mkennedy@timesfreepress.com.

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