Today we’d like to introduce you to Melissa Kerley.
Hi Melissa, thanks for joining us today. We’d love for you to start by introducing yourself.
I was born in Alabama. We moved a lot…I have lived up and down the East Coast Coast…as far north as Maine and as far south as Florida. The reason we moved so much is that my Dad was really good at what he did so he got promoted and transferred a lot.
My family was living in New Jersey when I was fourteen. My friends were all either Jewish or Italian so they all had a second language (Hebrew or Italian) and special foods and traditions and holidays I didn’t.
I wanted those things too.
The first chance I had to learn a second language was 9th grade and I chose French.
I thought I had no culture…both my parents were from Alabama as I was. Southern Culture is a real thing but back then I didn’t understand that. I have heard it said that we all see every culture but our own. I absolutely believed there was nothing special about my day to day life or my family’s habits and values. Not wearing white after Labor Day, eating country ham with red eye gravy and saying yes ma’am and no sir to adults were to me just annoying things my parents made me do.
More than anything I wanted to be French.
And from Day 1 of French class, I tried.
Looking back I have to laugh that believing wearing scarves year round, drinking my tea from bowls and perming my hair to get Isabelle Adjani’s curls could make me French . . . but then again I laugh at a lot of things I believed at fourteen.
I went to France on two different three week long exchange trips while in high school and spent my junior year of college in France.
As an undergrad at Colby College I majored in both English and French. I did my masters in French at Middlebury College’s language schools and my Ph.D. in French at Tulane. I founded two language schools, the second of which, Everywhere There’s French, I am currently running and have been for eighteen years now.
In my thirty-eight years of teaching I have worked with every age, grade and level both in and out of schools. My youngest student was an infant and my oldest student was 89 years old.
I had never planned on being a teacher . . . although I was the only person in my world who didn’t always know I would become one.
Since my first t teaching job thirty-eight years ago in one capacity or another I have been in education. Teaching has become a huge part of my identity and I am incredibly grateful to my students for the incredible life I have been able to live because of them.
People like to say they have gotten to where they are “on their own”. I don’t believe that is ever actually true but in my case I can say that not only have I absolutely not done it myself I wouldn’t even have wanted to.
I couldn’t have gotten to where I am now without the teachers who work and have worked for me, the mentors I have had, including my parents especially my mother Sandra Johnson Kerley, my father Richard Kerley and my stepmother Pat Kerley, my students themselves, clients, friends especially Matt “Matt-nifique” Petrowski, family (in particular my sister Christina “CK” Kerley), the advice of random people on airplanes (yes, really!) and other chance encounters.
Sometimes I like to think of the fourteen year old girl I was when I decorated my first French notebook or the twenty-two year old first year teacher I was when I decorated the walls of my first classroom.
I ask myself if I have lived up to their dreams, if I have served them well, and what they would think of me if we could all sit down and have dinner together.
I think they would feel I have done right by them, and that they would like me quite a lot (although I know I would find them exasperating but loveable in the way young people can be).
And I think they would be delighted to hear of the wonderful adventures I have had getting to the me I am now and of the dear, dear people who have accompanied, helped and inspired me along the way.
To all the former me’s, to the amazing people I know and have known and those who will be joining me on my journey in the future I want to say: Thank you, thank you for my life!
I’m sure it wasn’t obstacle-free, but would you say the journey has been fairly smooth so far?
Things with my school now, Everywhere There’s French, are going quite well but that is in part because I learned so much from having to close my first school, Speak Abroad. It was in a seasonal town in Florida and although I was able to run it and employ, at its height, six teachers, over the long term it wasn’t sustainable.
It was devastating to me to lose Speak Abroad but now as I look at Everywhere There’s French and its fantastic teachers, administrators and students I am grateful things happened just the way they did.
Thanks for sharing that. So, maybe next you can tell us a bit more about your business?
Everywhere There’s French is an online French language school. We have teachers from every region of the francophone world…at current we represent five continents, fifteen countries and five island nations…and we are still growing!
We do one-on-one tutoring, group classes, cultural presentations, professional development for teachers, student and teacher workshops, classes for homeschool students and full families and prepare people for important and high stakes French language exams of all sorts including the FSI exam, college and graduate level proficiency exams, the AP language exam, the IB language exam, the DELF, the TCF, the TEF and many others.
We are a unique language school because we work as a team….We develop the study plan and materials for each student as a group, and follow our students together as they grow.
To do this we meet three times a week as a faculty to discuss each student’s progress and needs, visit each other’s classes regularly and have a common database for materials, including exam prep information, that we as a faculty have accumulated and created over the past eighteen years.
We like to say that each student may only have contact hours with one teacher but that every student is the student of every teacher.
So maybe we end on discussing what matters most to you and why?
A lot of things matter to me but fairness is at the heart of most of them.
Animal rights, for example, is about fairness to animals. My support for social justice and an equitable society, is about fairness to people.
And the way I run my business is about fairness to my employees, our students and clients.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://everywherefrench.com
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/everywhere.french?stkn=cjZqazN3dXEyY3Z4
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/melissakerleyphd?utm_source=share_via&utm_content=profile&utm_medium=member_android
- Youtube: http://www.youtube.com/@EverywhereFrench
- Yelp: Check out Everywhere There’s French! https://yelp.to/PYetDSLu0R
