Coucou tout le monde ! My name is Sean Em Rufo-Curran (they/them), and I go by my first name, Prof, or Teacher with students. I am starting my 12th year teaching semester-long French classes and my 10th year working full-time in a public-school setting in Massachusetts (as of September 2nd, 2025). This is the beginning of my 4th year at Arlington High School.
Outside of being a French language teacher, tutor, translator + interpreter, I am a linguist who loves learning languages and learning about sociophonetics, second-language acquisition, and the sociology of gender, race, class + power as pertains specifically to LGBTQ+/queer youth and linguistic minority groups.
I am a native speaker of American English with my C2 (DALF) from le CIEP (le Centre international d'études pédagogiques) in French, awarded December 2016 at the French Cultural Center in Boston, MA. This corresponds to the levels distinguished + superior when looking at ACFTL language proficiency guidelines. I am therefore a fully bilingual, literate, and college-educated (MA) near-native French speaker.
I am an advanced and fluent speaker of Romanian, which I began studying in December of 2020. I received the rating of advanced low on the OPI (the Oral Proficiency Interview -- a proficiency exam from ACTFL, the American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages) in Romanian in August 2023 and plan to sit a C1 exam in Bucharest in the summer of 2026. I traveled to Sibiu, a city in Transylvania in July of 2023 and used my language skills in an immersive environment for the first time in... a long time (see final photo below).
I do not have fluency in the following languages, but from middle school to the end of graduate school, I completed 3 semesters of Spanish / 2 semesters of Latin / 2 semesters of Uzbek / 1 semester of Serbo-Croatian / and in August 2023 and most recently, I did 1 semester of ASL, or American Sign Language!
I am a transfemme, non-binary + queer educator and diagnosed autistic (with ASD, or autism spectrum disorder) and I advocate and fight for the right of queer and neurodivergent youth to be their fullest selves, safe, and well cared-for in our country's schools. I also advocate for substance abuse + misuse prevention in K-12 contexts while affirming students' abilities to make increasingly independent decisions around their life and available resources.
I co-advise Arlington High School's GSA with Emily Tessier from Social Studies/History and have done so since the fall of 2023.
Outside of linguistics, languages, education, and social activism work, I am an avid gamer and Pokémon adept. I am also a tarot card reader and consultant who studies & uses astrology and numerology. I love all things music: singing, musical theatre, pop + popular music culture. I am a tenor, a formal choral section leader and soloist for a MetroWest-based choir intermittently from 2019 until September 2024, and I currently perform in a different community choir and publicly in Greater Boston a few times a year as a soloist and in groups.
I live in West Roxbury, MA with my husband TJ, also a high school French teacher and our French Bulldog, Lola Jane Rufo-Curran (pictured below).
