Dartmouth '78 Rassias

The ever-irrepressible Professor John Rassias joins us as our dinner speaker on Saturday, June 14th. Come join us as he turns our dinner into a «vrai événement» (a real happening for those who have forgotten or never learned French with M. Rassias).

M. Le Professeur

We all know Professor Rassias, chair of the Department of French and Italian and --- most importantly for us --- founder and former director of Dartmouth's Language Study Abroad program. As always, he is the No. 1 advocate and avatar of "full-contact learning."

Rassias joined the Dartmouth faculty in 1965. He is best known as the developer of an innovative approach to teaching languages, known as the Rassias Method or the Dartmouth Intensive Language Model.

Thanks in part to Rassias' years as an actor in Paris, his Method includes some fifty dramatic techniques that banish the inhibitions that retard the acquisition of foreign languages. Many of you have brought your skills as drill instructors into board rooms, classrooms, and other work environments.

Since 1967, his approach has been utilized by all language departments (including Chinese, French, German, Modern Greek, Hebrew, Italian, Japanese, Latin, Portuguese, Russian, and Spanish).

He is also president of the Rassias Foundation at Dartmouth College. Its purpose is to revitalize foreign language teaching while using the resources of the vast network developed through the Rassias Method. It is used to teach

• Spanish for New York City Transit Police
• French for the northern Border Patrol
• German for IBM executives
• Spanish and English for Citibank executives
• Russian to United States Army officers

Professor Rassias graduated from the University of Bridgeport. He was a Fulbright scholar, studied at the Université de Dijon in France, where he received his doctorate. He also did research at the Sorbonne, studied French drama, and acted in Paris.

Every LSA group had its miracles. For Bourges winter 1976, it was Steven Henry, John Bressoud, Jon Reilly, Robert A. Williams, Lesa Walden, Roland Feltner, Jim Friedlich, Bill Wechsler, Leo Krumpholz, Tony Shuga, Burke Whitman, Tripp Peake, Steve Myers, Phil Flink, Melanie Graves Rios, Park Dougherty, Steve Thompson, George Veith, Debbie Simon and I putting on West Side Story in French, as master pianist Tom Ostertag played the entire score.

I'm sure if Professor Rassias asks us, we can all still sing "Ce Soir," to the tune of "Tonight," and --- to the tune of "When you're a Jet" ---

"Quand on arrive dans cette toute petite ville on voit bien que les roues, ils sont toujours tranquille. Mais avec nous tout cela va changer, si on joue avec nous on recherche le danger . . ."