Jeanne McGill, MA

Hello! My name is Jeanne McGill and I’ve been teaching German for the Well-Trained Mind Academy for several years now (plus one year of Spanish). I’m also finishing up my doctorate in non-native language acquisition at Indiana University Bloomington. Even though I grew up only speaking English, I always loved exploring other languages and cultures. I have a BA in German with a Spanish minor, and a master’s degree in German literature from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. While I was there, I continued studying Spanish and also became interested in linguistics. Then I started homeschooling my seven children, who are almost all adults now. I owned the original WTM guidebook, signed by both Susan Wise Bauer and Jessie Wise!

As I homeschooled my children and taught various classes, I found myself becoming more and more fascinated by the language learning process itself. So, almost 20 years after earning my MA, I returned to grad school for my PhD. In the 2019-2020 academic year, four of my children and I lived in Berlin, where they attended a bilingual school and I did research, until the pandemic shut everything down. My research investigates what happens when German/English bilinguals begin learning their third language, Swedish, a subfield of linguistics called third language acquisition. At IU, I had to start learning a new language so I chose Finnish and later received two Foreign Language Area Studies fellowships from the Department of Education to study the Nordic region and continue my Finnish. Now I’ve also been teaching Finnish! 

Over the years, I’ve taught lots of subjects and worked with many different kinds of students (middle schoolers, high schoolers, homeschoolers, community college students, international students, students at a small liberal arts college, students at a huge state university, and returning adult students). I love getting to know my students and helping them to achieve their goals! When I’m not teaching, doing research, or studying languages, I like hanging out with my children, exploring with my dog (he went to Berlin too!), traveling, writing fiction and poetry, and reading.