Revere High School (RHS) French-speaking students began RHS’s newest language club in an attempt to further students’ appreciation of French language and culture.
Juniors Ayushman Mukherjee, Lylah Wilson, Eli Brackett and Julia Winchell came together to start the new RHS French Club this year. The teacher/adviser for the club is RHS French teacher Diane Gerspacher. The club is open for any RHS student to come and learn about the language and culture of the French people. It offers games, snacks and people who are there to help students learn. Mukherjee has many reasons why he decided to start the French club.
“I noticed that we had Spanish Club, and there was a lot of that going on, but there wasn’t as much interest shown for French, so I [thought] starting a French club could help [to] balance that out,” Mukherjee said.
RHS clubs will operate differently depending on how the officers run them. Mukherjee and the officers run the club in a way that students can relax after school in either Gerspacher’s room or Lawrence Petkovsek’s, the RHS Latin teacher’s, room.
“Everyone will have a snack, and then they’ll go sit in the seats in the back of the classroom, either Miss Gerspacher’s, the French teacher’s room, or Mr. Petkovsek, the Latin teacher’s room. Then, the officers will do a Google Slides presentation about the topic,” Mukherjee said.
When students join a club, it can add stress to schoolwork, but the French club is trying not to add extra stress and make a club where students can relax and enjoy learning something new to them.
“We didn’t want to make it super academic and school-related because French class itself can already be stressful for a lot of people with grades and everything. So we really wanted to take all that stress out and just have a fun time with everyone,” Mukherjee said.
According to Mukherjee, the hardest parts of starting the club came at the beginning of the process when they had to get approval from RHS principal Doug Faris and recruit the first members of the club.
“Getting the logistics of everything through when we were first getting everything to Mr. Faris [was difficult]. Then, finding people who were willing [to join was hard], but after I got through that first layer of people who wanted to come to the club and help the club out and like get my officers, it wasn’t as difficult because people reached out to their friends and everything and that really helped us grow,” Mukherjee said.
Every new club has to go through a process to get its club up and running. This requires a lot of work to make sure that the club will stick around for more than just two years.
”The reason we make it a little difficult is . . . we want the club to be around for a while. So they have to schedule a meeting with the principal as the first step. And during that meeting, they talk about why the club exists. And then they have to get a petition of at least ten signatures of kids who would join the club. And then they have to provide the name of an employee of Revere Schools who would be responsible for the supervision of the club. Then, they had to provide a schedule and then a reminder is that it can’t be for profit. And then once that’s all approved, they become a club,” Faris said.
A challenge comes for clubs after they have been alive and running for two-to-three years. They have to find a new leader after the old one graduates from RHS.
“Ideally, the biggest test for every club is once the person who started it graduates, does the club still exist? And if it does, then great. If it doesn’t, it just kind of goes away,” Faris said.
French Club meetings are a way for students to enjoy learning about French culture while being able to have a quick snack and talk to friends. Gerspacher talked about what a regular meeting looks like.
“[Mukherjee and Winchel] have something prepared, some kind of presentation prepared on some kind of topic. So they do the presentation, they usually have some snacks, and then there’s usually a game, and that’s the [basis] of it. It takes about half an hour, so it’s from 2:45 to 3:15,” Gerspacher said.
