Learning about Canada's French Culture in Montreal by Ruth Paget
I learned about the vestiges of French exploration and/or colonization from my high my first French teacher in Detroit, Michigan. She was from Guadalupe and ran an efficient classroom.
She told us that French was a language of diplomacy, business, art, cuisine, and fashion to introduce us to the language we would be studying.
She also gave us expectations for classroom behavior and homework rules. She emphasized that if we wanted to go on the spring break trip to Montreal that we would have to keep our grades up. “Up” meant a “B” or better.
I loved traveling and studied hard to make it onto the train to Montreal in the province of Quebec, Canada for a week. Instead of taking the tunnel under the Detroit River to Canada, my mother drove me to Windsor in Ontario over the Detroit-Canada Bridge, so I could see the Detroit skyline.
As soon as you enter Canada, the signs are in English and French, signaling a different way of life.
Almost all of the students in my school including me had been to Windsor, Canada. Windsor offers visitors river front gardens, a great view of Detroit with John Portman’s (b. 1924) Renaissance Center in the middle of the skyline, beautiful restaurants, and crystal and china shops galore along Oulette Street.
Montreal was a cousin to Paris albeit colder, we had learned in our teacher’s orientation session before we set out on the trip. I thought Montreal must have had massive traffic jams as it is located on an island where the St. Lawrence and Ottowa Rivers meet.
Our teacher made sure that we could order in a restaurant, buy clothes, purchase movie tickets, and get directions in French before we headed out to Montreal.
Everyone stayed up all night on the train talking with our friends, telling jokes, and playing logic games like 21 Questions and Who am I?
Upon arrival in Montreal, we loaded our suitcases into a tour bus and took an all-day city tour, which required several stops and walks up steep hills. The hills seemed steeper than they were, because we were tired.
The stop that interested me the most was our visit to St. Joseph’s Oratory. I had been in Catholic Churches before, but had never seen a pilgrimage site before. Canes lined the walls along with crutches and wheelchairs left by people, who had been cured by a visit to the Oratory.
According to the Michelin Guide I read years later, Brother André, born Alfred Bessette (1845 – 1937) created the devotions to Saint Joseph at this church that healed ailing pilgrims.
Some of us lit candles and prayed for loved ones.
Our next hilly stop was Parc du Mont Royal which was planned by the landscape architect Frederic Law Olmstead (1822 – 1903), who had planned New York’s Central Park.
We drove through the exclusive Westmount neighborhood to get to the park and took many photographs of the nineteenth century mansions, which reminded us of Detroit’s exclusive neighborhoods of Palmer Woods, Indian Village, and Sherwood Forest.
Later in the week, we took another tour bus out to the Olympic Park built to host the 1976 summer Olympic Games. These games were fresh in our teen minds in 1979. I loved the excitement of sports; the skier Franz Klammer was my favorite athlete.
We all complained to our French teacher that she had not arranged for us to go swimming in one of the six pools of the aquatic complex. I think she might have wanted to throw all of us into a swimming pool after five days in a youth hostel.
The best part of our trip, though, was getting to spend a day in a bilingual high school. We attended algebra, English, and biology classes. In English, we read parts in a readers’ theatre of part of Shakespeare’s Macbeth in a Grade 13 class; Canadians go to school for thirteen years. The algebra and biology classes were taught in French.
I could keep up with the algebra class and was happy, because I knew that Canadian schools at the time were among some of the best in the world when using international testing standards.
I also learned from one of the English-speaking teenagers that she liked studying French, because it reinforced her understanding of English grammar. I was not entirely sure of what she meant until I studied French for another year.
When and why to use certain verb tenses became very clear to me in English as I studied the same verb tenses in French.
When I diagrammed sentences in English class, I knew exactly what to do with subordinate clauses thanks to studies of French as well. French was my insider secret to doing well in English class. That secret was the best souvenir I brought back from Montreal.
By Ruth Paget, Author of Eating Soup with Chopsticks and Marrying France
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