Meet Francine Shirvani

Photo Credit: Zoey Patterson

By Zoey Patterson

Francine Shirvani is the second of two new French teachers at Athenian to be reported on here. She’s teaching French 3 and AP French. While she speaks French natively, she began teaching it out of pure happenstance.

“To become a citizen, they said...they needed language teachers,” Shirvani said. “So I decided, okay, I’ll teach French for a year until I get my green card.”

However, Shirvani wound up teaching French for much longer than a year.

“I love to teach, I love French, and the kids,” Shirvani said. “I love teenagers, which, some of my friends, they say, ‘you’re crazy’—no! They’re great!”

Despite this, before coming to Athenian, Shirvani had actually retired from teaching.

“I did College Board stuff, you know, corrected APs, taught teachers, and I thought, you know, I miss the classroom, I miss the kids,” Shirvani said.

Distance learning has thrown a bit of a wrench in Shirvani’s plans to return to teaching.

“I’m completely new to this Zoom thing and all this technology, although I do love technology,” Shirvani said.

In addition to technology and teaching, Shirvani has a multitude of other interests.

“I love to swim, so if I don’t swim, I am a basket case,” Shirvani said. “I love to sew...I love French music, French TV, anything French.”

Shirvani is not exclusively French, though.

“I love this country, but I’ve kept a lot of my culture, and my father was Iranian, Persian, my mother French, so I’m tri-cultural,” Shirvani said.

American culture is one Shirvani is still being exposed to and learning more about.

“Obviously, my English is not perfect yet, but at least I have lost the French accent,” Shirvani said. “But my daughter always makes fun of me, because she was American-born, and she’ll correct me all the time, and I love to be corrected because that’s how I improve my English.”

Improving her English is one of many tasks and goals of Shirvani’s.

“There’s 24 hours in a day, and you get up, and you have so much to do, and you go to bed, and there’s still 15 other things you wanted to do, but you need to sleep,” Shirvani said.

This is Shirvani’s justification for a core trait of hers.

“I never get bored,” Shirvani said. “I’m a little prejudiced that way—it’s boring people who get bored. That’s terrible for me to say, but it’s true. I mean, how could you get bored?”