New Spanish Teacher Mrs. Vazquez Finds Fuel In Life Experiences

By Beza Kifle

Mrs. Vazquez had a pretty abnormal start to her 13th year of being a teacher. “I find it to be a very interesting year so far, this is definitely not the way that I would have expected to start the school year,” she told me. Rather than starting on August 16th as we all did, Mrs. Vazquez started on September 11th.

Noting that the number 13 is a weird number because of its negative connotation, she’s happy to be in her 13th year because “every year comes with challenges, and every year comes with good things,” she said.

We talked after Rev. Allen’s sermon in Chapel last week, where he spoke about how we do not know where life will lead us.  Mrs. Vazquez told me that it really spoke to her. “I try to make sense of everything that happens to me as fuel to give the best of myself,” she explained. She told me that she felt like everything had been leading her to being here at Lovett. 

She applied to different schools, but since the school year had already started, there were no openings, she told me. “I felt like it just wasn’t the time, so I pursued other opportunities, but those opportunities just didn’t work out,” she explained.

Now that she is almost a month into the start of the year, she acknowledges that it was a difficult adjustment. “When you become a teacher, they prepare you for all these different things, but no one walks you through like, what if you were to start the school year on September 11 with no planning,” she explained. (And did I mention that she did her Lovett interview from her car?) 

Even though she said that it was one of the hardest things that she’s ever had to do, she’s handled everything so well.

Mrs. Vazquez has been teaching Honors Spanish 3 since she came and AP Spanish (I’m in her class) since last week. 

In H. Spanish 3, there are mostly freshmen, and she loves that they’re very curious to learn a new language. “I just love the enthusiasm, the energy, and the thrill that they have to be in the Upper School,” she said. Although AP Spanish has just started, we have had a really good start to the curriculum. I actually have my first vocabulary quiz today.

As a teacher, Mrs. Vazquez enjoys making the classroom a fun environment for students to be comfortable and excited about learning. When students are having fun, she knows that learning is happening. “I’m not your average Spanish teacher, and I think that’s what I bring to the table. I’m unapologetically myself, and I have fun in the classroom,” she told me.

Mrs.Vazquez, along with her husband and 2 kids, moved to Atlanta all the way from Barcelona, Spain last August. In Barcelona, she taught at a school called La Miranda, the Global Quality for 10 years. Since she has degrees in both Spanish and English literature, she has taught Spanish as a second language to some students, and English to Spanish kids. Additionally, she taught Catalan, a second mother tongue in Spain, to foreign students. She explained that Catalan is a mixture of French, Italian, and Spanish.

She has taught different grade levels, from elementary to college level, but she said that likes high school the best.

I asked about life in Spain, specifically with soccer, because of the two rival teams of Barcelona and Madrid. She told me that her father was born in Barcelona, while her mother was born in Madrid, which means there was a natural rivalry growing up whenever soccer games were on. “I feel like my parents really modeled a healthy and good relationship between soccer and real life,” she said. She explained that during the 90-something minutes of a soccer game, her parents would just not speak, but there was never any tension.

As for the rest of the Spanish population, she said that there was no real hatred between people from Barcelona and Madrid, which “is probably one of the greatest experiences about my culture,” she said. Soccer is a huge part of Spanish identity, and “it’s engraved in our blood, you defend your team like it’s your sister or brother playing,” she explained.

Now that she’s in Atlanta, she doesn’t watch the games as much because of the time difference, but she still loves the sport.

When she came to Atlanta last year, she “took that year to process moving to a new country and getting settled and getting adjusted,” she told me. She explained that Barcelona and Atlanta are very different so she had to get acquainted with everything. She did go to school and college in California, but the west side of the U.S. isn’t the same as the east. “I didn’t know what Publix was, or what Kroger was either,” she told me.

The past year allowed her to take some time off to have some fun and relax, and take her kids to the aquarium, the zoo, and other places. “I was also able to figure out where I wanted to work,” she said. 

Coming from Spain, Mrs. Vazquez told me that food is not very diverse there because they don’t cook with a lot of spices and sauces. She said that it’s made her stay in her comfort zone with food, which is why whenever she goes to Chick-fil-A (her favorite restaurant), she always gets “a number one with no pickles,” she said. But being in Atlanta, with a lot of food, has meant venturing out with “baby steps,” she said. She has been planning on trying a restaurant called Barcelona. 

In class, she mentioned that she also taught in China, so I asked about what it was like there. She told me that she lived in northeast China in a city called Changchun for 2 years, where she grew up and learned a lot about being a teacher because it was her first teaching job after grad school. 

“I feel like the culture really taught me a lot about my own learning experience as a language student,” she told me. When she came to the U.S. at ten years old, she was an ESL student, which stands for English as a second language. “I remember I really struggled when I first came to the U.S. for a good 2 or 3 years because I was very shy,” she said. 

She had a lot of teachers that really impacted her learning journey, and she was able to “understand that that was an opportunity of a lifetime,” she told me. Working in China allowed her to have empathy and understand what students were going through since she went through it too.

Mrs.Vazquez told me that she got to experience a lot of Chinese culture and other Asian cultures when she traveled around Asia. “I tried a lot of really cold foods, and not so many good ones, as well,” she said. She also took private classes to learn the language. She told me that at first, she thought that her teacher was yelling at her, but it was “actually the intonation of the words that sound that way,” she said. She finally learned enough to know that her teacher wasn’t actually yelling at her. 

She’s been trying to get back to China, but the pandemic unfortunately delayed her return. She hopes to return one day with her kids since she talks about it a lot.

During our conversation, I realized that she had mentioned a lot of languages, so I decided to ask her to list out all of the languages she knows. After learning Spanish and Catalan, she started learning English at 5 or 6 years old. When she was in 5th grade, she started her 4th language, which was French. Last, she learned some Chinese, which means she knows 5 languages. She may have arrived a little late, but she’s certainly in the right department.