By Tyler Brand

Dr. Mark Andrew Hall has spent the last eight years at Collegiate teaching Upper School French, but he had many stops on his journey to Richmond. Dr. Hall was born in Camden, a small town in southern Arkansas. However, he and his family did not reside in Arkansas very long before moving west into Texas. They moved to Texarkana, Texas when he was eight, and they lived there for “almost five years” before moving to Athens, Georgia, where he felt like he grew up, as “that is where I spent all my formative years.”

In Athens, Dr. Hall attended Clarke Central High School, where he “always enjoyed French, but when I was in high school I did not ever think I would become a French teacher.” He explained, “I really wanted to go into the foreign service.” In order to achieve this goal, Dr. Hall thought he would simply study French and then study politics in college, at which point “I would probably go to law school and then go into the foreign service.” Despite this thoughtful plan, Dr. Hall emphasized that he “hated” his first politics class in college “and that kind of sent me on a different path.”

After graduating from high school, Dr. Hall continued his journey at Wake Forest University in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. There, he majored in French literature. He explained that “by the time I was in college, I had kind of figured out that I was not going to go into foreign service, and I thought, well, I could become a professor because I really enjoy studying French poetry, and I’d like to study it more.” Dr. Hall then added that “I had already had some experiences that led me to think that I’d like to teach.” As a result, Dr. Hall applied to graduate school and ended up picking the University of Wisconsin. However, before attending graduate school following college, Dr. Hall spent a year teaching English in Dijon, France.

To begin his professional career, Dr. Hall was a college professor and spent most of his time at Ithaca College in upstate New York. But he and his wife, who is from Richmond, worried about their kids growing up in Ithaca, as it is “isolated,” and they didn’t want their young children “to grow up there being so far away from everyone.” So, they decided to come back to Richmond, where Dr. Hall started teaching French in the Upper School at Collegiate in 2014. Their two daughters are now 12 and 15, and his wife of 21 years is currently a French professor at the University of Virginia.

Outside of the classroom, in his free time, Dr. Hall “likes to run,” and “I run every other day.” Furthermore, Dr. Hall plays both the guitar and banjo “a lot,” and he likes to read. In fact, he even played the banjo during an Upper School assembly in May 2017 (Dr. Hall starts at 21:00). During the assembly, he explained that, while “living in rural upstate New York,” his wife and daughters gave him a banjo. At first, “I didn’t really know what to do with it,” as there weren’t many options for lessons. Although Dr. Hall “had been playing guitar since high school,” he acknowledged that “a banjo is not a guitar, and it is not played the same way.” Thus, Dr. Hall “slowly, with the help of books, recordings, and YouTube, taught myself how to play.”

Dr. Hall in a backyard selfie.

Dr. Hall settled on an unusual style of playing the banjo called “clawhammer,” a method involving the middle finger and the thumb, rather than the more common three-finger method. After receiving the banjo, Dr. Hall began wondering why he wanted to play the banjo in the first place. He explained that he has immersed himself in French culture all his life and has dedicated himself to sharing his knowledge with others. “The funny thing about immersing yourself in another language and culture…is that you end up learning just as much, and maybe even a little bit more, about yourself.” So after all of the time he spent studying the French language and culture, Dr. Hall has “come away with…not only a deeper appreciation and understanding for what it means to be French, but also a deeper understanding and appreciation for what it means to be American.” He realized that he is “not French, and neither is the banjo.” Thus the appeal of the banjo is that it is “perhaps the most American of all instruments… Playing the banjo and these tunes reminds me of my Americanness, and I think that I have a better appreciation for what that truly means, because I have a pretty good idea of what it means to be something other than American.”

Dr. Hall is currently in his eighth year teaching at Collegiate and says Collegiate “has changed a lot” and “gotten a lot bigger, even in the time I have been here.” He explained that “this affects how we organize our space,” especially with spacing requirements due to COVID-19.

When asked what Dr. Hall is like in the classroom and what kind of learning environment he creates, Charlie Loach (‘23) responded, “it’s laid back, but he takes learning very seriously.” Michael West (‘23) responded, “Dr. Hall’s classroom environment is really an environment where everyone kind of feels like they can contribute… and it’s kind of a safe space for us to really express ourselves… the way that we want to… it’s really just a fun environment to learn in.” Virginia Ballowe (‘23) stated, “he teaches us to become better people through education rather than wanting us to just memorize random ideas.” Through his experiences and teaching, Dr. Hall strongly encourages his students to reach their full potential both in the classroom and out in the real world.