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My Love of Languages
Life as An English Teacher and What I Learned
I still ask myself how I found the time and energy to teach English ESL to Spanish-speaking children for twenty years four days a week while running our ranch on the weekends.
Learning Together
My school was a one-room classroom with a bathroom and an office area next to my house in Ensenada, Baja California, Mexico. I taught four hours a day. I had two classes for Beginners, an Intermediate class, and an Advanced level. The children were between the ages of seven and fourteen years old.
I’m fluent in Spanish. I also read and write in the language. My students taught me and I taught them. If I wrote a word on the whiteboard in Spanish that required an accent above a letter, they reminded me where the accent went and I never failed to remind them how to pronounce the “ed” at the end of a word or the “th” sound. For native Spanish speakers, these are difficult to pronounce. After thirty years living in Mexico, I still can’t roll my “r’s”.
I loved teaching and I love languages. When I moved to Mexico with my husband who was born and raised in Ensenada, I didn’t speak more than four words of…
