Sais—Tu Madame Christina M. Hess?
(Editor’s Note: The following story is about Christina Hess, the French, ESOL, and Special Education educator at Jasper County High School. It is the fourth installment in a new feature we hope to have weekly, Know Your Neighbor. Please, if you know someone interesting, or you have a story to tell, let us know. Any Jasperite or almost Jasperite can be featured in this space as we are all neighbors in this community. And everyone is interesting in some way.)
Monticello meet Madame Christina Hess. Many might recognize her as a Jasper County High School (JCHS)educator but she is so much more. For starters, she doesn’t just teach a single subject at the high school, she assists with several.
Madame Hess teaches French to a special group of students Monday through Friday at 10 a.m. each day while splitting the rest of her day between co-teaching Special Education and assisting with the English for Speakers of Other Languages (ESOL) program. She even manages to squeeze in some time with the English Literature class reading lines from William Shakespeare’s Othello.
Born in Southwestern Virginia, she moved to North Carolina in her twenties when she began teaching. Madame Hess earned a Bachelor of Arts from the College of William & Mary in 1986, earned teacher certification from the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill in 1988, earned ESOL certification from Kennesaw State University in 1995, and her Special Education certification in 2018.
As an exquisite French teacher, she also studied abroad twice earning Diplome Speciale from the Universite de Montpellier in France and from the Universite de Chicoutimi in Quebec, Canada. In addition to being well-versed in English, of course, and French, Madame Hess could perhaps assist one with a bit of Spanish, Japanese, and Portuguese.
Last year she joined the Jasper County Charter School system as a paraprofessional and now has advanced beyond her singular position then to utilizing her talents in many areas.
Madame Hess is much more than a classroom teacher—she is a wife, mother, grandmother who confesses that her hobbies include cooking, sewing, gardening, knitting, playing some tennis when she’s not spending some of her spare time at the beach or with her “beloved yellow lab, Bucky.”
Christina and her husband Dan, a former Marine Corps Harrier Pilot, have been wed for 27 years. They are parents to two, including daughter Isabella who herself is married to a Marine Officer and lives in California while raising Talia, the Hess’s sole grandchild at this time.
Many may know the Hess’s other offspring, Maximilian, as he is a graduate of JCHS now an University of Georgia (UGA) Reserve Officers’ Training Corp (ROTC) cadet who earned several scholarly and wrestling accolades as a former Hurricane.
Though she has devoted most of her career to teaching, Madame Hess has performed duties as a youth lifeguard to a historical archeology lab manager to a caterer. If by chance one happens to see Madame Hess moving about the school at a rapid pace it’s likely because she has many places to be and much to do but do give her a heartfelt “Bonjour.”
