She admitted she was not prepared to teach the Cajun French dialect, with which she had only a passing familiarity. But she was ready in other ways.

She had spent the last five years in the classrooms of Paris’s outer arrondissements, mostly teaching the children of immigrants. Her English is almost flawless, honed by school, television and the internet.

“I’m fascinated by this culture,” she said of America generally. She called it a jewel. She found it exotic, and found Louisiana to be “the exotic inside the exotic.” She praised the forward-leaning state of feminism in the country and marveled at Americans’ religiosity.

She arrived on campus on the first day of school last week at around 7 a.m. with a couple of bags slung over her shoulders, moving briskly past signs declaring the rules of the hallway (“Marchez en ligne droite,” walk in a straight line ), and the whiteboard lunch menu (coleslaw was “salade de chou”). She was more stressed than nervous. In the teachers’ lounge she grumbled at the bulky photocopier.

Her classroom was adorned with an American flag and the lockdown rules for an intruder scare. Parisians have those rules, too, she said, since the terror attacks of 2015.

Her 16 students trickled in, most of them in pristine first-day sneakers. Nekol Henderson, 38, dropped off her son Ethan Harris, 8, one of three African-American students in the class. Ms. Henderson said her family’s multigenerational tradition of French speaking had dwindled by the time she was born.