For Dominican Republic, I knew there would be more challenges, but I just could not pass up the opportunity!
Ever since my parents sent me to school in Peru, I would dream of staying and spending the rest of my childhood there. I had this longing when I would increase my English reading level on AR (Accelerated Reading) tests. When I was a kid, there just were not nearly as many AR books in Spanish as there were in English. The ones I could find were usually directly translated from books originally written in English. I did not feel like I had as much of a chance to improve my reading ability in Spanish like I did in English. When I got to classes for Spanish heritage speakers in high school, they would usually assign us classic novels right away and I felt like I missed out on a whole genre of Spanish children’s literature growing up. Since my parents could not send me to school in Peru for more than a few weeks every five years, I could not wait to grow up and teach in a Hispanic country as soon as I had the chance.
Because I graduated college during COVID, I had to wait a few years before I could take my chance. In the meantime, I taught dual immersion classes (part of the day in Spanish and part of the day in English) in California and went to Mexico in the summers to get my Master’s in Spanish. These experiences helped me a lot as I got to see that the amount of children’s books in Spanish had increased substantially since I was a child. My Master’s also helped me to read much more confidently in Spanish. I loved seeing what Mexican bookstores had to offer and investigating some of the best quality Spanish children’s books worldwide.
