Classes in the Montezuma-Cortez School District resumed on Monday, and students were joined by more than three dozen new staff across the district. Among them are Ana Rodriguez-Araya, who is teaching Spanish at Montezuma-Cortez High School, and Brook Stevens, who is teaching second grade at Mesa Elementary School.
Rodriguez-Araya is originally from Costa Rica but moved to Cortez from North Carolina with her husband and two dogs. She taught in North Carolina through a program that places educators from abroad for five years. Once that program ended, she accepted the Spanish teaching position with M-CHS.
Rodriguez-Araya said she was excited to get to know her students and instill in them a love for learning another language. Her approach to teaching includes varied activities and practice techniques that she said make learning Spanish enjoyable.
“They can expect a lot of different activities,” Rodriguez-Araya said. “I like to have them practice Spanish, and since it’s another language we have many different techniques which allow them to have fun while they learn.”
She also gave tips for learning another language, which included watching movies, TV series, reading and listening to music in the language.
Before becoming a teacher, her goal was to become a translator. Because there were no public universities in Costa Rica that offered translation, Rodriguez-Araya studied English teaching instead.
Once she started teaching English, she realized she loved teaching.
“When I graduated, the plan was to get a master’s degree in translation. But then I started working as a teacher, and I loved it,” Rodriguez-Araya said. “The rest is history.”
Now, as a new face in Cortez, Rodriguez-Araya expressed her excitement for the start of the new year and appreciation for the kindness she and her husband have experienced from the community so far.
“My family and I are very happy to be here, and we are loving how kind everyone is,” she said.
Stevens grew up in the Thornton-Broomfield area north of Denver, where she taught first grade before moving to Cortez. The last-minute move came about after she and her partner decided to move closer to his family, who lives in the Cortez area.
“We were like, ‘Man, it would be really wonderful to get away and move somewhere different,’ and I also had a baby this year. We just really wanted to try something new and go back to where his family was,” Stevens said. “It was very last minute, so it was very exciting, very thrilling.”
Stevens also spoke of her own difficult experiences in school growing up and said she aims to make her students feel valued and safe – something she didn’t experience in school herself. She said she hoped her students felt secure, supported and enthusiastic about learning.
“My senior year of high school, I was like, ‘That would be amazing if I could change that, because I'm sure there's many students that feel like they're not safe at school, that don't really feel valued …’ and that's just my ‘why,’” Stevens said. “It's something that's really personal to me too. I think every kid should be growing up loving school education. They should feel safe. They should feel loved.”
She also noted the district’s new instructional framework put in place to help students reach grade-level expectations.
“In the United States, kids are really behind academically,” Stevens said. “The new NES (New Education System) Model introduced to Mesa and the other schools could be really beneficial because there's a sense of urgency to get kids to grade level … I really am excited to see how utilizing this new framework will have an impact on student data.”
Along with teaching, Stevens travels often to Japan, where she has observed Japanese elementary schools and their customs. She also holds a Japanese language proficiency certificate.
“One thing I really loved and enjoyed (about the schools in Japan) was the sense of it being really seamless through the grade levels,” Stevens said. “So that's one thing I really like about this NES framework. It’s going to be almost the same grade level by grade level, so when kids move up a grade, they're not like, ‘What am I doing? This teacher has new rules than the previous teacher.’ (Instead), it's all kind of seamless and together, which I think mirrors that in a way.”
bduran@the-journal.com
