https://www.dalewoodwardfuneralhomes.com/obituaries/Margaret-Darlene-Hindsley?obId=23703736
https://www.wesh.com/article/couple-shoots-kills-elderly-woman-ponce-inlet/38698935
Margaret Darlene (Burnside) Hindsley was my French teacher in high school between 1987 and 1991. I studied French all four years in high school (including a two weeks’ spring break trip to France in 1990), continued the study in all four years of college (and one summer study abroad program at Université Laval in Québec, and taught French four of my five years of teaching. I took two groups of my students to Québec in 1998 and 2000, have visited Québec with my own children and have traveled in France with my husband twice, in 1997 and in 2023. I’m hoping to visit France with my husband, my son and his girlfriend next year. Madame, as we called her, inspired a love for the French language and francophone culture that has lasted my whole life. Until her tragic death in 2022, Madame and I corresponded a few times a year, and every time she wrote, she would close with, “Remember to visit when you come to Florida.” While my then future husband and I did attend her retirement party in Rochester, Michigan, I never did manage to take her up on her oft-repeated invitation to visit her in Florida.
In the links above, you can read Darlene’s obituary, lovingly written by her daughters, to learn about her life, including the six years she and her young family spent as missionaries in Paris and Toulouse, France. You can also read the news articles that were published in the wake of her tragic and senseless death at the hands of people she trusted as caregivers. The facts of Madame’s death are a terrible condemnation of the state of mental health policy, firearms ownership laws, and the reality of drug abuse in this country.
According to her obituary, “Darlene was a much-loved teacher, even winning teacher of the year award. She stayed in touch with many of her students until her death. She was responsible for starting the ESL [English as a Second Language] program in her district and in retirement began teaching English…to students in Africa.”
The first time I met Madame Hindsley, she came to our middle school to administer a language aptitude test to eighth grade students. She left a beautiful impression, and I was determined to sign up for her French I class, even though the aptitude test predicted I would be a “C” student. I had never been a “C” student, and thirteen-year-old me was horrified at the thought of becoming a “C” student, even in one subject, but I was willing to sacrifice my lifelong straight “A” streak to learn to understand, read, write and speak French. (I needn’t have worried. French came as easily to me as most everything else in school. I did have to study, but that also came easily to me. I can still see in my mind’s eye the legal pads I used to study vocabulary, with English on one side, French on the other, and then I would fold the paper over the French and make the translations repeatedly until I could do them without making any mistakes.) And so, I took French I, then French II, then French III, during which several of Madame’s students traveled with her to France over spring break.
We landed in Paris and spent three days (with a terrifyingly little amount of supervision) visiting the sites in the City of Light. Madame took us to Napoleon’s tomb at Les Invalides, to lunch, and then set us all loose. She would reconnect with us now and then over the three days, and we were all staying at the same hotel, but it seemed to me, a very sheltered and if anything, over supervised teenager, that I was no more than a speck of dust, far from home, without anyone watching. I suspect now that Madame really knew what she was doing. She had given us all the tools that we needed and wanted us to feel in charge of our trip, in charge of our lives, to see everything we really wanted to see, without being told what we had to do. On one of her reconnections with a small group of her students (including me), we were walking around the Champ-de-Mars, the public gardens around the Eiffel Tower, and Madame spotted an African man selling beautiful traditional wood carvings. He had a set of wooden elephants in graduated sizes, and she wanted them. She pointed; he gave her a price. She made to walk away, like that was way too much, and he came down a few francs (1990 was before the Euro). We started to hear the freaky-weird sound of the French police siren in the distance, and Madame was just standing there, acting like she was thinking about his price. Suddenly his price was less than half the previous suggestion, she quick-swapped money for elephants, the man snatched up his blanket with all the rest of his wares inside it and absolutely disappeared. A police Citroen 2CV pulled up nearby and two policemen hopped out, eyes darting in vain for the art seller, who must have been working without a permit. Madame was already 50 yards away, illicit elephants concealed in her handbag, pointing out the French names of flowers with three or four students bobbing in her wake. We never talked about it afterward.
Our trip included a one-week family stay in Joué-les-Tours. Every American student was paired with a different family in the area and treated to a week living a real French life. Some students stayed with families who gave them only the true “real-life” experience – they did laundry, cooked, did yard work, went to Mass on Sunday, etc. I was lucky enough to stay with the David family (Yves, Marie-Joseph, Xavier, Pierre-Marc and Phillipe), who treated me to all the usual things AND made provision for me to see so many of the area’s cultural treasures. With Xavier and his girlfriend, I saw Château Chenonceau, with Marie-Joseph I went to Château Azay-le-Rideau, Yves took us all to the Tours Cathedral, Marie-Joseph’s friend and coworker Carole took me on a walking tour of Joué-les-Tours, and one day I went to school with Phillipe.
After the family stay, back with Madame and the other chaperones, we saw lots of other sites in northwestern France, including Versailles, Mont-Saint-Michel, the Normandy beaches, the cities of Saint-Malo, Le Havre, Caen and Rouen. After returning home, perhaps a month after our trip (giving everyone time to have their photos developed, in the days before digital cameras), Madame had all of us over to her house for a photo exchange. We swapped doubles and triples of our prints, and she taught us how to make crêpes in her big kitchen, filling them with everything from brandy and peaches to ice cream and strawberries. Somehow her house (which I visited again for her retirement party) in Rochester, Michigan, which looked like all the rest of them in her neighborhood from the outside, managed to feel so warm and European on the inside.
When I signed up for classes for my senior year, there was some confusion over what classes were available at what times, and I ended up getting signed up for a photography class and a drama class, instead of the French IV and German I classes I had requested. On the first day of school, Madame hunted me down during second hour photography, asked me why I wasn’t sitting in her second hour French IV class, and when I told her that I had intended to, but that I thought French was the same time as Calculus, so I couldn’t, she responded only “we fixed that, come on.” And so, with hardly a backward glance at Mrs. Carlson, off I went. The way they had fixed it – as far as I could tell, just for me, because no one else in my French IV class was in Calculus – was by moving the French III and French IV courses into one room. This was, then, seven years later, how I solved the same problem at Saranac High School. In 1997, when the school administration said they had no way to offer French I and French II in the schedule because they needed me to teach four hours of mathematics, I agreed to teach both French I and II the same hour. And then the following two years, I taught three levels in one classroom, the same hour. My students, like Madame’s, adjusted quickly and easily. Madame also fixed the scheduling issue that wasn’t allowing me to take German I, which was only offered at the same time as my Honors English course – she convinced Frau Renvez, the German teacher, to take me on as an independent study student during her third hour prep hour. And so I learned German mostly on my own in the library during third hour, meeting with Frau Renvez once a week to go over the things I’d learned and giving her time to despair over my German, spoken with a French accent.
Though I did feel Madame did take a special interest in me, it was probably no more than she did for any of her students, French or ESL. I have always been proud that I was able to contribute one small thing to her working life, though. In my sophomore year, when I was the treasurer for the FLAC (Foreign Language and Culture Club), she allowed me to use her computer – at the time, a state-of-the-art Macintosh – to keep track of the club finances, but also, since she knew she could trust me to use it properly, to type my sophomore English term paper. When she made handouts for her French classes, she had previously always written them out by hand on ditto masters and then run copies off on the ditto machine. That year she was working on converting all her handouts to computer masters, which could be xeroxed for students. But every time she would print out a new master, she would have to add all the accent marks by hand before making copies. I can’t remember how I learned how to type letters with accent marks, but I did know how to navigate the whole ASCII symbol menu, and I taught her how to use it. From that point forward, all her handouts were professionally accented.
When our school accepted two refugee students from the Balkan wars in Bosnia, Madame was instrumental in taking them from having zero working knowledge of English to integrating them completely into school and community life. It took her less than two weeks of one-on-two instruction to get them into a regular class schedule, and within a month they had friends, a support system, and were involved in after-school activities.
Madame Hindsley had a massive influence on my life and the lives of so many other people. I think of her often and am honored to share my portion of her story.
Comments
Post a Comment