Beyond Boston: Exchanges

Learning a foreign language at Commonwealth often includes the chance to experience a foreign culture through one of our exchanges and trips. Students from high schools near Madrid, Spain, and Strasbourg, France, visit Commonwealth and stay with Commonwealth families, and in March our own students travel to France and Spain with faculty chaperones.

Life with a host family is demanding and rewarding, prompting one student to report with awe that “I could speak and people actually understood” and another to write a detailed, fascinated account of the election drama that unfolded in Spain in 2004.

While not every exchange happens every year, the aim is for all the participants to experience it from both sides. When the French and Spanish students are in Boston, students and teachers offer special classes and sponsor social events. Students of Latin, the other language we offer, often travel to see antiquities in Rome and Pompeii on another chaperoned trip in March.