Paul DuCett is known to many of his admiring students as a quick-lipped Spanish teacher with a mysterious past who embodies sarcasm in its purest form. But the real Mr. DuCett cannot be reduced to any of these labels. Those closest to DuCett know his sarcasm is only one facet of his multi-dimensional personality.  Mr. DuCett has earned a reputation for being “unnecessarily harsh.”  However, all he really wants is some respect from the students. In turn, he is willing to give respect to those who love to learn, who have a strong interest in language, and who are never insubordinate.  Could he loosen up a little? Maybe.  Is he strict for a reason? Definitely.
Mr. DuCett wouldn’t be so insistent that everything be done right if he did not take our education as seriously as we ought to.  But he doesn’t just enjoy teaching because of the pleasure it brings him to see our eyes light up in wonder when we learn to conjugate a new tense. “The students think I’m here to teach them, and I am,” DuCett says, “but I think I’m really there mostly to teach myself.”  DuCett believes that teaching a language adds something to his knowledge of the language which even a native speaker may not have.  “Obviously I’m not a native speaker of Spanish, so the average native speaker would know more Spanish words than I do. But, since I’m a teacher of Spanish, I’m more likely than any native speakers to know the variants of different countries,” he explains.  
While Mr. DuCett will often crack jokes about teaching ungrateful children, he does take his job quite seriously, and has worked hard to become a good teacher.  He says that there is definitely a difference between knowing a language and being able to teach it.
Mr. DuCett began learning languages in junior high: “When I was in 6th grade, my sister was in 8th grade, and I started doing her Spanish homework...  She just found it boring, I saw the book hanging around and I took it and said ‘Oh, this looks interesting,’ and I started doing it.”  Despite the unconventional start to his language education, DuCett has been an avid language learner, studying languages at Harvard and Columbia, among other schools.  
Gramatically, Russian is Mr. DuCett’s favorite language.  He has been to Russia thirty times, once per year, and he says it used to be his best language next to English, though that may not be true right now. Why Russian?  “I don’t know.  I think I like the intellectual culture there.  People sat around drinking tea and talking about politics and literature.”
But it’s not only culture that DuCett enjoys.  Mr. DuCett loves everything about language, and has books in about fifteen different languages in his house.  At the moment, he’s very into a witty Russian podcast he recently discovered.  
Aside from language, Mr. DuCett enjoys throwing small dinner parties for himself and his friends at his home in Queens.  Behind his biting sense of humor and the high standards he sets for his students, Mr. DuCett is a gracious host with a sweet tooth: “I like to cook, I like to make sweets.  I make my own ice cream and desserts.”