Mermaid on Land

"Enjoy your happiness" - Mark Leonard - When I was in school my dad used to tell me, “Be good. Be nice. Have fun”. He felt that those three pieces of advice were enough to ensure that I would be successful and happy. He was right. They were broad enough to encompass every little thing he may have wanted to say to me: “Don’t drink too much.” Have fun/Be good. “Work hard in school.” Be good. “Treat others the way you want to be treated.” Be nice. “Follow your [big] dreams. Even the crazy ones.” Have fun.  I still often think of those three small pieces of advice. They get me through the moments when I want to say something mean to someone else, the moments when I’m afraid of doing something new, and the moments when I’m faced with a tough decision. When I graduated from Franciscan University in May he gave me a book called The Last Lecture written by former professor at Carnegie Mellon, Randy Paush. Paush wrote the book in the last months of his life while h...

If there is one thing I have discovered post-grad it is that just because you're not at school anymore does not mean you stop learning. In fact, I'm convinced the learning begins in earnest after graduation. As I was reflecting on the three weeks I've spent at Montclar, I realized that I have already learned more from the kids than I will ever be able to teach them. Before telling what I've learned from each age group, I'll explain how the classes are separated.  P0-P5 is preschool--P0 is for babies who are not yet 1 year old, babies in P1 are 1 year old, toddlers in P2 are 2 years old, and so on. Primary school is exactly what we would think of as 1st-6th grade. ESO stands for  Enseñanza Secundaria Obligatoria (in English Obligatory Secondary School). The students in 1st-4th of ESO are the same age as students in 7th-10th grade in the States. However, the curriculum of ESO is much more similar to high school than to middle school. Students in batxillerat...

Hello From the Other Side (Of the Pond) My wanderlust has gotten the better of me and I find myself thousands of miles away from home once again. This time I am in Igualada, Spain. It is a town of about 40,000 people and is an hour (by car) outside of Barcelona.  It has been a little over two weeks since I got on a plane to travel across the world so I can teach English as a second language. I have been called brave for diving into this new part of my life head on, but the truth is I hardly slept the night before my first day of school.   Being that I have a degree in Spanish and I have been around the language my whole life, I would like to say that there has been no language barrier but that just isn’t true. In this part of Spain, Spanish (Castellano) is rarely spoken. Catalan is the preferred language of Catalunya. However, everyone who speaks Catalan also speaks Castellano and kids learn Castellano at school. My host family usually speaks Catalan...

“The magic thing about home is that it feels good to leave, and it feels even better to come back.” I thought the blog things would just be for my semester abroad, but I’ve realized that I have a lot more to say and that writing has been a really positive outlet for me. I guess I’ll start with a sort of reflection on the last few months. When I first started this blog I named it Mermaid on Land because a mermaid on land is out of place. I thought it described what I was about to experience perfectly…what’s more out of place than an American student studying abroad in a small town in Austria? I’ll tell you what’s more out of place: an American student whose life was changed by studying abroad when she’s back in America, a second semester senior in a 400 level english class when she’s never taken an english class before, an introvert in a class that requires her to take videos of herself interviewing someone else and then present that video to the rest of the class, a New M...