A Hip Teacher
It might be easy to stereotype teachers of a particular subject, but anyone who does so with Deidre Mayer is making a big mistake. She’s awfully hip. Certified to teach French, Latin and ESL, the Huntington High School faculty member is exceptional at her craft according to students and parents.
It probably shouldn’t be surprising that Mrs. Mayer ended up in her current career. “I started to speak French at three,” she said. “My dad lived in Switzerland for seven years. “We conversed in French throughout my childhood. I started Latin in sixth grade and never stopped.”
The Huntington teacher won the “Level 5” Summa Cum Laude Award in her senior year at Miss Porter’s School in Farmington, Connecticut. She also earned second place in the state in a French declamation contest.
A self-proclaimed linguist at 15 years old, Mrs. Mayer took Advanced Placement exams in English, French and Latin, in which she was so proficient she was able to skip an entire year. She graduated at the top of her high school class and “met some of the most brilliant people, who I’m still in touch with today.”
What’s her philosophy in the classroom? “Teach others with kindness, sincerity, sensitivity and a great sense of humor and most importantly patience, patience, patience, support and a lot of encouragement,” Mrs. Mayer said. “You never know what kind of a life experience or daily experience a student may be having. Don’t take anything too seriously and try to have a positive learning environment in which students are comfortable producing the foreign language on their own terms.”
The 10-year Huntington veteran wants her classroom to be an exciting and relevant place to be. “Language classes should never be dead silent,” she said. “Students should be immersed in the language as much as possible. The four language skills should be covered in each class: listening, speaking, reading and writing.”
Part of her job is to “figure out what makes a student tick and try to get them do express themselves en Francais! Some are artists, musicians, athletes and poets and if they can use a skill they are comfortable with coupled with the foreign language it’s a winning combination,” said Mrs. Mayer, who together with her husband is the proud parent of a son. She is expecting a daughter in late March.
“My colleagues in the foreign language/ESL department are the hardest working, supportive and most reliable, devoted and caring people I’ve ever met at any place I’ve ever worked,” Mrs. Mayer said. “The faculty is really a great asset to Huntington High School.”
Summers at NYU
As a teenager, she spent time during summers taking graduate courses in French and Latin at New York University. “I knew later on I was destined to get an MA from there,” she said.
Her college experiences included Mount Holyoke and Barnard College, where she majored in French, minored in Latin and completed a thesis on the Evolution of the Medea Myth and Identify of its Heroine in which she compared version in Greek, Latin and French from authors Euripides, Seneca and Corneille.
Mrs. Mayer returned to NYU for graduate school, majoring in French Language and Civilization. Her thesis there was on “Attitudes and Motivation in Learning French as a Second Language.” She has earned an additional 60 grad credits above her master’s and studied in NYU’s program in France.
French and Latin weren’t the only languages other than English that surrounded Mrs. Mayer from a young age. “I was also brought up with Yiddish, which is such an expressive language,” she said. “My husband speaks Hungarian, Romanian, German and English. He came to the U.S. speaking very little English so I spoke to him in French and Latin and we understood each other. I call him my first ESL student! When our family is together, it’s like the United Nations: Hebrew, French and Hungarian and Romanian are flying around. A second language isn't just a hobby for the Mayer family it’s a necessity!”
Prior to landing in Huntington for the 2000 fall semester, Mrs. Mayer taught part-time in Bethpage, worked in C.W. Post’s Long Island Center for Gifted Youth, earned tenure in Kings Park and traveled extensively with students there to Canada and France and was on the faculty at Southwoods Middle School in Syosset.
She’s taught every level of French, from seventh grade to AP to a course for college credit through Adelphi. She’s also taught three levels of Latin, including all three at the same time in the same classroom. “I am probably the only nutcase who has taught three separate curriculums in one class,” Mrs. Mayer joked. “This was really nuts!”
She’s known to have a “question of the day” that requires students to listen, repeat and respond to whether it’s a grammatical topic or literature. “I do this to insure that students are aware of sentence structure and are able to conduct conversations way beyond the walls of the classroom,” Mrs. Mayer said. “All of my students can speak conversational French expressing needs, wants, likes and dislikes. It also lets me know what they are thinking. Language learning is work and requires discipline, especially with upper level grammar and literature, but it should be fun. Even Latin, a language which is not conversational, can be fun with games and role-play.”
Pet Peeves
Her pet peeves? “When students are dishonest or put each other down,” she said. “Those are the few battles I pick with the kids.” While she’s always looking for new ways to motivate her students, Mrs. Mayer derives her own motivation from what she considers one of teaching’s most exciting experiences. She calls it the “aha” moment. “Seeing grammar click; the ‘aha, I get it now!’”
She loves watching “student epiphanies” when it all comes to together language-wise. There’s enjoyment in watching student productions in French and seeing students defending their projects and field questions from classmates. Her playful side surfaces when she notes the pleasure she gets from watching students “making up puns and jokes in French and giggling with excitement.”
Naturally, Mrs. Mayer enjoys all the awards her students annually earn, “but I find the day-to-day epiphanies and intellectual growth way more fun,” she said.
Favorite Moments
Asked for her favorite moments in Huntington, the teacher came up with an interesting selection, including Brandon Logigian interviewing himself in French and describing his sports career, Tom Cummings doing a “French rap” and using all of his tenses, Fiona Byrne rewriting “The Little Prince” in her own words in French, Sammy Sainthil writing an alternate ending for “Phantom,” Ariel Wertheim explaining why the phantom of the opera was so diabolical, Leslie Flores writing a “beautiful” poem that won first place in the Long Island Language Teachers contest and second place in the American Association of Teachers of French competition and “teaching the same kids for three and four years and watching them grow in front of your eyes.”
Another unforgettable experience came when Laura Titus played the guitar in class and sang a song she wrote in French. The whole thing came about when Mrs. Mayer gave students a project topic involving the use of certain tenses. “I give the kids parameters for a project word count, grammar and vocabulary and a list of choices,” she said. “You can do the same material for years and give the same choices but it never fails that kids within the same class always come up with different things. It never gets boring!
One of the joys of her job is “when kids come back to visit and stay in touch,” Mrs. Mayer said. Another real pleasure is when “kids who write to you years later telling how you influenced them. You just never know!”
A glimpse at the past offers a hint of what might be coming for Mrs. Mayer. “I love to travel with students abroad and love to see them use their language skills and experience the thrill of travel vicariously through their eyes,” she said. “I haven’t done this with Huntington High School students but would love to in the future.”
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