(Hillary is the 6th grade English Language Arts/Social Studies teacher at REALM. Find her bio on the REALM faculty bio page)

What is your passion? What are excited learning about right now?

My passion is history and how real people are affected by events and moments in time. I am excited about revisiting Latin American history and the history of sugar cane in the Caribbean, which I haven’t studied in awhile. I am eager to study more about ancient civilizations, since this is the history I will be teaching in 6th grade. I am also really excited to learn, speak and read more Spanish.

Talk about a teacher you liked learning from. How has that experience influenced your teaching?

One of my favorite teachers was a college professor of mine, Dr. John O. Stewart. I took five classes with him, including a study abroad trip to Trinidad and Tobago. I slowly came to understand the genius behind his teaching. Not only did he have a wealth of experiences to share, he pushed students to research and really explore on their own. He valued the individual student’s self-reflection and learning process.

Learning from Dr. Stewart influenced my approach to history and literature, in that I began to see how these areas of study were truly multidisciplinary. History connects to anthropology, which connects to economics and politics, which connects to people’s everyday lived experiences, which connects to the stories that they tell. In my teaching, I strive to combine these disciplines in a way that feels like you are getting the whole picture, not just a piece of it. I want students to be able to creatively approach material, interpret it in a variety of ways, and reflect on their own learning.

Describe something you learned recently. How was the learning process delightful? Diffiicult? Surprising? How did it feel to succeed (or fail) what you were learning?

During our first Project Aruna service learning trip to Guatemala this June, I learned some words in the Maya Mam language, one of 24 Mayan languages spoken in Guatemala. We visited a school where students’ first language was Mam (their second was Spanish). The students taught us words for things like house, school, flower, etc. The sounds were so difficult for me to pronounce, even with corrections and encouragement from the students. It seemed like there were so many different variations of the same sound that I couldn’t hear, much less pronounce. The /s/ sounded like the /tz/, and I couldn’t tell the difference between those and the /tz’/ sound. I felt like I failed miserably!  But the way that the students were so patient and eager to teach us made the experience wonderful.