Some teachers teach summer school, but very few of them fly to Europe to do it.
But that is the case for Elora resident Nadine Tischhauser, who happens to be a Major and Senior Logistics Operations Officer in Service Battalions in Hamilton.
Tischhauser has been a reservist for 19 years, and has had tours of duty in Sarajevo, Bosnia, as well as serving in Haiti, Lithuania and Puerto Rico.
“I’ve been everywhere but Afghanistan,” she said in an interview on Monday, hours prior to taking off for Europe.
She will be working this time for CIOR (the French acronym for NATO’s Interallied Conference of Reserve Officers) to instruct at the Language Academy.
She explained that every year the CIOR chooses a different country for its meetings, and one of the things it does during that stay is run a language school.
“I will be teaching French- as a second language to Reserve Officers from Central and Eastern European nations,” she said. There are 20 instructors selected from Canada, France, United States, United Kingdom, Belgium and Italy to do that work. Only four military personnel are selected from Canada and, she said, “I will be the only one representing the Army Reserve.”
She said the language program has been running about seven years and is offered to help some groups learn French and English. Those are NATO’s two official languages, but she said those who are not from Western Europe might not know either of those two languages. She noted those from Spain or Italy seem to find learning French easier than learning English.
Tischhauser said in the past when she has done NATO tours of duty, she received a leave of absence from the French Catholic School Board, where she worked as a teacher.
Now, she works there as a supply teacher, but she noted no leave is needed for this stint abroad because she expects to be home before school starts again. She said she will be teaching seven days a week for the full three weeks.
