by:  Amanda Pickwick and Becky Plunkett

From growing up in Switzerland, learning French, English, and Spanish, living in Madrid and attending college in the United States, Mrs. Eleanor Brown has the best experience to be one of WHS foreign language teachers. Her love and passion for language and culture has brought her to the town of Westborough, Massachusetts to teach world language.

Mrs. Brown was born in Switzerland and lived there for the first eight years of her life. She describes her childhood as “pretty regular.”  She attended to school, swimming lessons, playgrounds, and skied. She has a brother who is three years younger than she and she spent a lot of time with him as well as the rest of her family and her friends. Mrs. Brown immigrated to the U.S. when she was nine. Mrs. Brown attended Natick High School and graduated in 1995. She was on the swim team, ran indoor and outdoor track , and played softball. Mrs. Brown met her future husband and high school sweetheart while on the track team.

After high school, she attended Middlebury College in Vermont. She was a chemistry major for her first year then switched to a French and Spanish major and minored in psychology. She graduated in 1999 and earned her degree. She did a year abroad and lived in France and Spain for six months each. Later, she went to graduate school at Harvard.

After attending Middlebury College and Harvard for graduate school, Mrs. Brown came to Westborough High School. When asked what her favorite thing about teaching was she says, “It’s different everyday. Although the verbs don’t change and the vocab words are the same, kids’ reactions and responses to it are different everyday. And one of my colleagues always says it’s one of the only professions where you get laugh everyday because there’s always something funny happening.” She likes a laid back classes, where students can laugh, but still work hard and learn. Mrs. Brown’s advice for people taking her class is, “Don’t forget your old vocab. Because vocabulary is cumulative, so don’t forget to look over that chapter one vocab in chapter six. Listen to your teacher.”

Mrs. Brown finds teaching Spanish easier because she was once the high schooler in Spanish class, learning to conjugate verbs and order at a restaurant in Spanish. She knows the best way to learn for Spanish students while in French, she sometimes doesn’t know how to explain the language she grew up knowing.  Mrs. Brown’s reasoning for becoming a teacher is, “I think that the value of being able to understand other people and culture is really important to help promote peace and understanding in the world. I think if more people studied languages and cultures then there’d be fewer fights because you’d understand why other people think a different way.”

Mrs. Brown is trilingual, fluent in  English, French, and Spanish. She would love to learn to speak Arabic, Portuguese, Hindi, and Italian proving that even when you’re the teacher, you still want to learn. She spoke English at home from an early age. Her parents who are from the England taught her the language. She started learning French at the age of two when her parents put her in a French preschool. Mrs. Brown didn’t learn Spanish until she was a freshman in high school. She took Spanish as her foreign language because she was already fluent in French so the school wouldn’t let her take it. Mrs. Brown had a hard time choosing between French and Spanish because they’re both very different and she likes them both for different reasons. However, foreign languages beat English hands down.  Mrs. Brown thinks other languages are so appreciated because to her “they are associated with travel and culture and foreign languages are what has allowed [her] to travel and use [her] language and try different foods and talk to different people.”

Mrs. Brown has been to many different places and countries around the world. All the languages she knows were put to good use. She has been to most of Western Europe and as well as Canada. Her favorite place she’s traveled to is Florence, Italy. She said it was an amazing place and she didn’t spend enough time there. She still wants to see Africa including Cameroon and the Ivory Coast as well as Portugal and south of the United States.

Mrs.  Brown has lived in four different countries which is absolutely amazing. As already stated, she was born in Switzerland, so that’s one country, and she moved to America which makes two. She’s also lived in Paris and Madrid when she did her year abroad in college for a total of four. She adored the two cities and enjoyed every second of living in them. Mrs. Brown says she’s spent so much time in England visiting extended family that it almost counts as living there. Maybe living in so many spectacular places has a downside. Brown can’t pick a favorite- they’re all so different. She found Paris pretty and artistic and Madrid was warm and welcoming. “It’s different,” Mrs. Brown adds, “There’s some things that are better. Like there’s just more open space; planned open space is something that they really value. But it’s easier to get jobs here.”

It is Mrs. Brown’s 16th year teaching at WHS and she lives with her husband and two year old son, Nathaniel, to whom she plans on passing down her knowledge on language. With a long lists of places to visit, and languages to learn, Mrs. Brown is definitely not done exploring the world and understanding other cultures.