La vida es un viaje, and for Fiona Grove, the new French and Spanish teacher at Oyster River High School (ORHS), son voyage a été très intéressant.
For those who haven’t taken Spanish or French with Grove: life is a journey, and her journey has been very interesting. Grove, a former ORHS student, spent her high school years knowing her goal: to one day work for the United Nations (UN). A determined and goal-oriented person, Grove embarked on her post-high school journey and gained experiences working and living in two foreign countries. However, instead of leading her to the UN, her journey led her on a different path and helped her discover what she truly wanted: to become a world-language teacher.
Her journey to this realization starts at ORHS, circa 2013-17. Grove was the epitome of a high-achieving student. “She was phenomenal, and I cannot stress that enough. In the years since, when we’d talk about a really strong, amazing student, a once-in-ablue-moon type student…we’d say they’re like a Fiona,” says Wendy Gibson, ORHS Spanish teacher. Gibson had Grove as a student and now works as her colleague in the World Language department.
The study of language was a defining part of Grove’s high school experience. She took French in middle school and continued taking French in high school while also starting Spanish her freshman year. After a Spanish-immersion summer program at Middlebury College the summer before her sophomore year, she rejoined her age group in Spanish 3. Later on, she took French at the UNH level, and helped Shawn Kelly, ORHS English teacher, in creating the high school’s Linguistics class for an independent study her senior year. Grove was drawn to this because of her passion for foreign languages.
She was dedicated not only to language learning but also to academics. “I was pretty serious, I was driven by a couple of concrete goals, and I had a relatively strong sense of who I wanted to be in the world,” says Grove.
Grove maintained these goals into her college career, and when she enrolled at Colgate University in New York, she was determined to one day work for the UN or the state department. She majored in International Relations and East Asian Studies with a concentration in Japan, continuing her language education by learning Japanese.
For a few months in spring of 2020, she interned with the UN in Geneva, Switzerland, putting her foreign language skills to use. However, she didn’t enjoy those few months at all. “I didn’t feel very excited by the work I was doing; it really didn’t allow me to explore my interests in the way that I thought it would,” says Grove.
After striving to work for the UN all those years and believing for so long that this was her dream, she had a bit of an identity crisis when she realized it wasn’t. However, the work she had done to achieve the goal also gave her the tools to become the teacher she is today.
Before teaching, Grove was an au pair in Paris, France, meaning she was essentially a French nanny on a special cultural Visa. She enjoyed this experience immensely, having the opportunity to walk around Paris and soak up the culture and the people for a year, according to Colgate University Magazine’s article “Relocate to Paris With Fiona Grove, ‘21.”
Then, she returned to the States, and the issue of her career-identity-crisis returned. “One of the reasons I was interested in working for the UN or going into politics is because I’m interested in global politics, I’m interested in history, I love language learning, and I also kind of enjoy public speaking, which I think makes being a teacher a little bit easier,” Grove says. “My parents are both teachers… I love academia, I love language learning, I love sharing my passion with others, and so becoming a teacher just kind of felt like the next logical option.”
LeiLuna Plourde (‘28), is a member of Grove’s advisory and in her Spanish 2 class. “She doesn’t just go to work, she… helps people to not be so nervous when they come in… she asks how we are all the time,” says Plourde. Even though she’s only known her advisor for about a month, Plourde appreciates Grove’s accepting and positive attitude.
“It’s been a good transition,” Grove says, regarding the beginning of the school year. “One of the things that has been great about Oyster River so far is all the external factors are just amazing: the administration, the students I have in class, the orientation that we had at the beginning that really gave a thorough rundown of what to expect here, and what was expected of me.”
Gibson is grateful that Grove was willing to come back to ORHS to teach the next generations of language learners. “We’re really lucky to have her. It’s hard to find a teacher who can teach French and Spanish, and the fact that she has that flexibility is a great thing for the language department,” she says.
Grove’s journey from high school to now has made her a well-prepared ORHS world language teacher. “I was really positively influenced by most of the teachers that I had at Oyster River in terms of my interests and aspirations, my growth, my desire to be the kind of person I wanted to be in the world. And I was also really heavily influenced by both of my parents who are teachers, and their worldview.”
While Grove’s goal throughout high school and early college was to work for the UN, her experiences gained from pursuing that goal, combined with her innate sense of self and input from her parents and teachers, will inevitably benefit her newfound purpose of teaching and her work in this district.
“She was a really hard-working student, and the same is true of her as a teacher,” says Gibson.
-Paige Stehle
Mouth of the River 
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