I am thrilled to return for my ninth year at Animas High. I am stoked to be teaching 9th grade again, and I look forward to a stimulating, inspiring year of building our learning experiences together.
I started my education at Michigan State in 1996, studying Spanish and Political Theory, but after several years I moved to Colorado as the call of the mountains got too loud to ignore. After three years of travelling, Denver city living, and writing bilingual poetry, I found myself in Durango, ready to return to college to study the two languages that I love so dearly. I looked into education on the advice of a professor and discovered a new passion: sharing my effervescent love of language with young people. I graduated from Fort Lewis in 2005 ready to pursue that passion.
After student teaching at Durango High School, I accepted a job in Costa Rica. That initial job turned into many interesting teaching experiences with students of all ages, mainly teaching English to Costa Ricans and Spanish to foreigners. In those years, I also met my husband, a Costa Rican native, and gave birth to my beautiful bilingual son, Luca. (Our second child, Reya, was born in November of 2017.)
I returned with my familia to the United States in 2009 after four years of exploratory bilingual teaching in the jungle. In my absence, Animas High School had been born. Luckily, the AHS staff recognized me as one of their own. At Animas, I have found my niche as an educator, and I remain inspired by the reasons I got into education in the first place. I am still very much a student of my own profession, having finished my Master's in Education in the FLC Teacher Leadership program last year. I am thankful every day to be pushing the paradigms of education while helping each of my students on their path toward finding their life's purpose.
I love all of the typical things that Durangotangs usually love: trails and camping and being outside. I also love hip-hop and fantasy football. Above all else, I love language. Writing it, reading it, breathing it. I am a word nerd in the truest sense. I am lucky enough to be fluent in this hemisphere's two dominant languages, and this bilingualism has determined my path both personally and professionally. I have been known to commune with the ghosts of dead poets (in Spanish and English), and I have a reputation for my love of rhetoric and literature. It is my most esteemed pleasure to share this passion with my students!
