When I was growing up, my career choice was not clear.  I do remember playing school in my family's basement and at a cousin's house. When we dreamed about what we wanted to be when we grew up my future didn't seem clear.  But my usual answer to 'the career question'  until after college was, "not a teacher".  That was the only definite.  So, what happened?

              I don't know.  It just happened.  After college I worked a year in the registrar's office of a community college.  One day I heard that the adult education program was looking for a teacher for a beginning Spanish conversation course.  With no teaching experience but a lot of curiosity, I volunteered.  My interview consisted of my telling the committee how I envisioned  a practical language class.  They liked what they heard and I was hired.  So my teaching career started with my teaching 15 adults conversational Spanish.  I taught two semesters and enjoyed every minute of it.

            Once in the classroom I was hooked.  So that impulsed me to look for a graduate program which was not linguistics oriented but rather experientially based.  I found the School for International Training (SIT) in Brattleboro, Vermont.  To get into the program, the applicant had to have a strong background in linguistics (which I had from my undergraduate classes)* and have experience living overseas (which I had also)**

            That program convinced me to be an educator.  The classes made learning interesting in a way  that  I had not experienced in my academic career.  It taught me that education was not so much about teaching as it was about learning.  You can teach all you want but that does not guarantee that the students are learning.  Everything we did in the program was connected to learning.  We became language students (I studied French) and we became teachers (I taught German).  We watched language classes and we interviewed students.  We learned by doing.  Looking back over the experience,  I believe that the ideas which we learned way back then were ahead of their time.  Vygotsky would be proud of us!
 

             Until I started at SIT, I had planned to teach Spanish.  When there, I changed from teaching Spanish to a double major in Spanish and ESL/EFL.  After SIT I took a job teaching EFL in Iran with a language teaching company, Telemedia, Inc.   I worked there for a little more than three years starting out as a teacher, and was promoted to a teacher/trainer,  building supervisor, and finally, materials writer. 
 

            In Iran, I started out as a teacher and was quickly moved to a teacher/teacher trainer.  In the position of teacher trainer, I tried to instill in the new teachers a desire to facilitate learning, rather than just teaching the material.  I would observe the teachers who were having difficulty and offer suggestions or demonstrate a more effective way to teach a grammar point.  I also watched demonstration lessons by potential hires and made recommendations for hire.  In that capacity I was able to see both good teaching and bad teaching. 

            In my last year (of three) I worked on developing a curriculum for the listening lab that all students attended for an hour every day.  I co-authored two volumes of lab exercises.  Each book was based on the structures in English Sentence Structure (University of Michigan Press) but with the needed vocabulary and context which helicopter mechanics would need.  In order to write the materials, I visited the flight line and followed the American mechanics who would be working with the Iranian mechanics to find out the kind of language the students needed to respond to.  And I found out what kind of specialized vocabulary the students needed to know in order to work with the Texan mechanics.  Those structures and appropriate vocabulary were integrated into the materials.  Using the required pattern practice drill format, I tried to make the language as realistic as possible. (Biography)
 

             When the school I was at in Tehran moved to another city, my husband, Paul, and I decided to take jobs in Greece.  We lived in Thessaloniki for three and a half years.  Paul was at Anatolia College as an English teacher and I was at Pinewood School teaching ESL.  I also worked at Anatolia College as a debate coach and public speaking coach.  At Pinewood, I worked with children grades K-12 from Japan, Albania, Yugoslavia, and Greece.  My students ranged from total non-speakers of English to almost fluent.  My materials consisted of a ream of paper and a ditto machine.  I had no books and no classroom materials.  I didn't even have a classroom.  I had a table in the library.  That experience taught me how to make materials which were relevant to the students.  I wrote stories with them as the characters and they wrote with me, read the stories and learned vocabulary from what they wanted to say.  We used the fields  around the school as our classroom.  We all learned.

            When my husband was accepted into the US Foreign Service, we left our teaching jobs and returned to the US for training.  His first posting, Tijuana, afforded me the opportunity to work at San Diego State University Foundation as a materials writer.  ARAMCO needed a book to use with Saudi Arabian oil workers who were going through language training in the US.  The students would then return to Saudi to work with Americans in the oil fields.  The project was short lived because of conflicting visions of what the students needed to learn and so there was no published product from this project.  It was very interesting to be part of a curriculum development team.  Not only did I experience writing a curriculum from the bottom up, but I also witnessed how lack of a clear vision can derail a project.

           After Tijuana came Ottawa, where I was a full time mom with two small children.  My son had been born in Greece and my daughter was born in California, since I was able to make it over the border to the US in time.  We left Ottawa after two years and came to Alexandria, Va.  The year was 1985 and it was the first time I'd lived in the States since 1974. 
 

            In Alexandria I was hired as an ESL teacher in the public school system.  For five years I was the consummate professional.  I taught at an elementary school, took courses and created workshops to help the mainstream teachers understand and develop strategies to work with non-English speaking children.  This interest in helping the mainstream teachers came about when a reading specialist at my school commiserated that I had to work with ESL children.  He said to me that if you put 10 non-English speaking children in a room there would be a combined IQ of about 100!  That remark has stayed with me since that day.  It was the motivating factor to get teachers to realize who they were dealing with in their classrooms. 

           I worked with a colleague and we developed experiential workshops based mainly on my experience at SIT.  At Brattleboro, we had done a number of simulations to get the feel of what living in an alien culture felt like.  We also had analyzed what we could learn about the culture by watching interactions.  I used that information to design workshops for teachers to experience what their non-English speaking students went through when they first entered the school system.  The reaction was enthusiastic. 

We started first with the teachers in the Alexandria school system.  Then I or both of us started presenting at conferences such as the ESL/Bilingual Education Conference sponsored by the Virginia Department of Education and the Washington area affiliate of TESOL (WATESOL).  Our last conference presentation was at the International Counseling Center's fifth annual national conference, Crossing Cultures in Mental Health:  Exploring Multiculturalism in Our Changing Society in May of 1990.  We gave a half-day session which was very well received.  (Workshops)   On that high note, I left my job, the workshops, the US  the following month. 
 
 

             My husband was transferred to the American Embassy in Uruguay.  Before arriving there I wrote to the US Cultural Center and the American School to see if there was a teaching job available.  The replies were delayed and it was a lucky thing for me.  When I got there and started job hunting, the realization that the salary of a teacher would barely cover gas money, helped me decide not to work. 

           One word to an established American in the community got me opportunities to keep myself busy.  The entire list of the clubs, associations, social groups and diplomatic groups I was a vital member of, would make your head spin.  I will touch on the ones which don't appear anywhere else in this portfolio and the ones which helped me to stretch myself and develop new competencies.  Even that list is extensive.

Very quickly after my arrival I became vice-president and then president of the American Women's Club of Montevideo.  With that office, I was in charge of running a consignment shop.  The president ahead of me decided to reorganize and right in the middle of the reorganization--after firing all the staff and before hiring any new staff, I became in charge.  It was my first time running a business but it ran smoothly for the two years I was in charge.  I even went to Uruguayan court when a former employee sued the club for wrongful dismissal.  As president, I represented the club and dealt with our side of the story, all in Spanish.  I tell more adventures while running that group in the Volunteer section but organizing and running a business helped me to develop my "people skills".  I also had to constantly think proactively because of the frequent moves of the itinerant foreign community.  I had to be one step ahead of any possible change in personnel or plans.

           Another group which stretched my skills and taught me some new ones was the British and American Hospital Guild.  I was a member for 3 years, serving as both vice-president and president of this group of 11 international women.  This was a fund-raising group for the hospital which was most used by English-speaking Europeans and Americans in Montevideo.  Again this was an opportunity to use my people skills and also my experience in cross cultural communication.  It also used my organizational skills to put together major fund raising events.

           Other clubs which helped me to develop my Spanish language skills were the Damas Diplomaticas, International Women's Club,  and Consular Wives Group.  The social groups helped me to feel very comfortable dealing in a second language.  In my quest to speak Spanish fluently, I learned by doing.  I took piano  and tennis lessons with teachers who spoke only Spanish. 
 

            After Uruguay came Toronto where I found a job teaching intensive English at Sheridan College.  The classes were four hours a day, five days a week.  I was hired because of my background in teaching technical English in Iran.  At Sheridan College,  I had groups of no more than 20 students and I was responsible for teaching them job search skills as well as English.  The students were adults and highly educated.  Most were professionals who recently immigrated to Canada.  One summer I taught a TEFL prep class which was an intensive 13 week, 4 hours/day course for international students.  Two other summers I taught English for Academic Purposes at Queen's University in Kingston, Ontario.  At Sheridan my students were mostly from the Middle East and Eastern Europe.  At Queen's I had one group of Japanese and another summer I had an eight week group mostly from Korea. 

           Each group increased my exposure to working with specific cultural groups.  My professional library grew as I started purchasing books on cultural differences and on working with specific groups.  At Queen's University, when I worked with the summer programs, I chose to live in the dorm with the students in order to immerse myself in their experience of learning English.

           I applied for a job teaching technical writing at the University of Toronto and was hired to teach a basic writing course for second language speakers in the Faculty of Engineering.  I also taught an elective for fourth year students  and graduate students on public speaking and presentation skills.  Both classes kept bringing one question to mind:  How can students go through an entire school career in an English speaking country and not be fluent in the language?  This is my puzzlement.  This is what is impelling me forward in the doctoral program.  It started in Toronto, working with Canadian students who spoke Chinese at home.  These students could not write a coherent paragraph in English.   They had difficulty expressing themselves orally in English.  Their errors were basic second language learner errors.  But yet they had been accepted into U of T, School of Engineering.  I still find myself thinking of those students.
 

            The next detour on my professional career took me to the American Embassy in Mexico City.  I had applied and was hired for an opening in the consular section.  The advantage of this position was that I would be rotating from 'doing visas' to American Citizen Services and to Citizenship/Passports.  I would be seeing Mexico from the perspective of the Americans as well as the Mexicans. (Short Story)

           For more than half of the two years I was in the consular section I interviewed Mexicans who were applying for a visa to visit the US for a limited stay.  I was not an easy job.  Most officers interviewed from 7:30 am until 4 pm.  We had to interview over 100 applicants a day.  We had to ask the right questions, look at documents and make a judgment call based on our impressions and immigration law in about 3 minutes per applicant.  My experience is described from an applicant's point of view in the short story linked above.  The applicant described portrays a typical situation. 

           Part of my time was spent in an office which dealt with American citizens and their problems.  During my time in that office I talked a man out of committing suicide and killing some Mexicans who had robbed him.  I dealt with runaway teens whose parents were trying to get them home and runaway teens whose parents did not want them home.  I maintained constant contact with a mother whose 19 year old son disappeared in Mexico.  I delivered the news that no one wants to hear of their relative dying while on vacation.  The list goes on.

           Those were the office calls.  Out of the office, I visited American prisoners to get permission to contact their relatives and to make sure they were treated according to law.  I interviewed people who tried to pass as US citizens because they wanted the protection offered to Americans.  I was always observing interaction of people to see how they react in cultural situations,  always trying to glean information from body language or mannerism. I studied people the way a teacher studies her class. 
 
 

           I left Mexico and returned to teaching.  I also returned with the determination to study for my doctorate and to return to working with teachers who work with culturally different students.  I am just beginning to develop workshops.  I will give one in December and another in January and I am planning for two in the spring. It is not enough for me just to promote the learning of my students.  I need do my best to make sure that the second language  students encounter a safe and favorable environment in which to learn. 

           The reason for choosing multicultural education as my minor area of specialization is  learn more about the background of my culturally different students.  I am basing what I do in the workshops on what I learned in graduate school 25 years ago and on my personal experiences and observations.   I would like to have a more solid theoretical, research based foundation.  My first minor area course starts this spring.  I can't wait. 

           In my present teaching position, I am at a school with a new dual language program.  It is in its third year.  I am watching it and the students in the program.  It will be my laboratory when I start formal research.  I am also watching the teachers who are teaching mainstream classes or working with the culturally diverse students at this school.  Using the interactions I see daily are providing situations  and inspiration for the workshops which are still in the back of my mind.  My job at this time offers me exposure to the areas which I want to research and to learn more about:  dual language program design and training in cultural awareness and sensitivity.