 "Photo: photo by Dana Dill UCD Advocate")
Paris, je t’aime! And so does Dr. Linda Alcott, a UC-Denver professor with a doctorate in French literature. Once a little southern girl from Jackson, Mississippi, Alcott now teaches boisterous French language and culture classes to UCD students.
Alcott will tell you that she’s got France in her veins. Her love of the culture began at a young age, with family trips to Creole and Cajun Louisiana.
Alcott said that in high school, her French teacher, who had a Ph.D. from Yale, would tell stories about her time spent in Paris.
“As she described walking along the Seine and buying books in the bookiniste, I could see myself there someday,” Alcott said.
To accomplish her goal of mastering French, Alcott took advantage of trips, fellowships, and friendships with professors.
“I was kind of the nerd,” Alcott said. “I had a little notebook, and every time we’d be at a coffeehouse or a café, I would write down special expressions—they just made me glow.”
Leaving France was hard for Alcott, but today when she sits with any kind of French literature book, self-help book, or French history, it brings her back.
Once, when she left Paris with tears in her eyes, her professor said that if she read, she would always have France.
Alcott has spent the last fifteen years of summers in France—her children have been to Euro-Disney two times but never to Disney in the States. She takes UCD students to the country every summer for language and culture immersion, showing students not only how to speak the language, but also that they can’t live without it.
Alcott’s animated teaching style has been described by students like UCD Photography and French major, Nyah Kirkaldy, as très bizarre.
“Unless you engage everybody—that means lots of eye contact, making everyone feel as if they’re on the right track, that they’ve made progress, that something they’ve done is purposeful and correct—unless you create that kind of positive energy, you will lose people,” Alcott said.
In addition, Alcott said that she knows students can have up to 18 credit hours a semester and that the last thing they need is a lecture.
“They need dynamism, to move around, open their hands, look at each other,” said Alcott. “They need to laugh, laugh, laugh.”
Alcott wants students to know that learning a foreign language is like paving a road that leads to richness. She wants students to take a class for the fun of it, for the joy of being able to switch from one language and culture to another.
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