Changes to the Romance Language curriculum this year include no French I class due to lack of interest and a new Latin course.

According to Romance Language Dept Chair June Graff, it was a shock to the department that seventh-graders had no interest in learning French.

“When there’s a problem, you start looking for solutions to the problem and I consider not having French I in 7th grade a problem,” Graff said.

According to Graff, there is only one French class per grade and only a few French entries to the Melting Pot, the school’s romance language magazine.

Graff said that there are several Spanish classes in each grade and an overwhelming number of Spanish submissions to the Melting Pot.

According to Graff, students’ desire to take Spanish comes from the knowledge that “people are guided by the fact that they are going to be professionals dealing with the Latino community, so they want to know the language.”

However, Graff pointed out that French has benefits as well. Worldwide usage is greater than Spanish, and if a student is interested in finding an international job outside Latin America, French is often a prerequisite.

Freshman student Molly Deutsch-Feldman said, “If you want a language that’s fun, interesting and you can use abroad, you should take French.”

Hoping to raise enrollment for French courses next year, Graff and French teacher Esther Bergman went to the Lower School during National French Week— Nov. 8 to 12—for a series of class meetings with sixth-graders.

Graff and Bergman taught students Alouette, a French children’s song, and played French word games.

Sixth-grader Dov Block said, “I knew that I wanted to take French because I have family in France—if you have some kind of background with French you start thinking about it more,” he said.

Sixth-grader Mira Fein, who was leaning toward taking Spanish before the meeting, changed her mind after meeting the language teachers.

Nonetheless, some sixth-graders remained unconvinced.

“A lot of them just wanted to take Spanish and that’s all they’re going to take,” Block said.

According to Fein, politics may be the deciding factor for many sixth-graders, as there are some who “are political, [and] they don’t like the French.”

For those middle school students who are indecisive, the Romance Language Dept. offers FLEX.

According to Graff, “FLEX is a semester course to give students a taste of the languages offered at school so that they could make an informed decision about what to study further when they elected their Romance Language.”

“It was offered once in 1992 to ninth-graders, as an experiment that was not successful since students preferred to have five or six years of study rather than four,” Graff said.

According to Graff, the course was brought back in 2002 for seventh-graders and has been offered until this year.

While the faculty are working hard to interest future students in French, they have had an easier task in meeting the current interest in studying Latin. Next semester the department will offer the first Latin course since 1994.

“Latin has a reputation for being difficult. The stucture of the language is different from English, French and Spanish because it has both declensions of nouns and conjugations of verbs. Also, Latin is not an actively spoken language, except within the Vatican,” Graff said, “taking French or Spanish before [taking Latin] makes Latin easier because [Latin is] the basis of these languages,” she said.

According to sophomore Aliza Fishbein, this interest in Latin is surprising because JDS students already have a lot to handle.

“The vast majority of us [students taking languages] take seminar Hebrew, we’re taking Spanish or French, we’re taking a lot of difficult classes, and most of us play sports,” she said.

According to Fishbein, students are only interested in Latin because “it will look good” on college applications.

Graff said that Latin was introduced as a semester course because given students’ full schedules and the Physical Education requirement, “we [the romance language department] could never get anybody to sign up for a whole year course.”

“We [the department] are really looking forward to seeing this [course] take off,” Graff said.