By Chloe Oliver
She is eagerly waiting for a response to see if she can visit the country that inspired her teaching.
To see the ones that she called family.
To visit the place she cherishes.
To place a renewed passion behind her career as a teacher.
Spain.
During her junior year of college, Señora Shawn Churchill studied abroad in Spain. Recently, she wrote a Lilly Fellowship Creativity Grant, and if the grant gets approved she will be able to visit Spain in the summer of 2025. She will find out on Jan. 24, 2025, if she gets the grant.
“I lived with a host family, and they were wonderful, so I really enjoyed the host family experience,” Churchill said.
Churchill wants to take her husband and her two daughters to meet her host family. A host family provides a home to people who are traveling from another country. She says that going to visit her host family is the first thing on her agenda if she gets to return to Spain.
She left to travel to Spain in late May 2004 and stayed for the summer. She went with her friend, Ginger Thompson, who is now a Spanish teacher at Yorktown High School.
“I was a little homesick,” Churchill said, “It was good to have someone I knew with me.”
She was only able to communicate with her family via letters and emails. She would have to go to an Internet cafe to write emails to her friends and family back home.
In Spain, the lifestyle is very different. In America, many people are always in a rush. We value money and getting ahead. In Spain, they value family and fellowship. They live life at a slower pace.
“I really enjoyed their laidback lifestyle and culture,” Churchill said.
The lifestyle in Spain is so laid back that they have the siesta española, or Spanish nap. In the middle of the workday, all the businesses close, and it forces people to go home, spend time with their families, have a meal, and rest.
She wishes that she would have stayed longer, at least for a whole year. However, she wanted to get her teaching license and go into the workforce to teach.
“That’s why I wrote the grant, so I could go back and experience some of the things that I didn’t get to experience,” Churchill said.
Churchill teaches her Spanish I students about various events in Spain like bullfights, the running of the bulls, and the human castle towers. If she can go back, she has the opportunity to see these Spanish events in person. Along with that, she wants to go to Barcelona and see some of Spanish architect Antoni Gaudi’s work.
However, Churchill didn’t only go to Spain. While in graduate school, she was able to go to Costa Rica. It was eye-opening for her.
“We were in the middle of the rainforest, so we had all of this beauty around us, but it was surrounded by poverty,” Churchill said. “I felt there in Costa Rica and Spain, people were truly happy.”
Her experiences from Costa Rica and Spain fueled her passion for teaching Spanish.
Señora Mary May has a different story. She lived in Spain as a little girl. Her stepfather was in the Air Force, so they moved to Spain, where she lived from age 5 to 9. The language barrier was something she had to work around.
“I had a best friend named Teresa. She was learning English,” May said.
They helped each other learn the other’s language. She says she hasn’t been able to find Teresa recently, but when she came back from living in Spain as a child, Teresa wrote her a letter in English.
Some days, May and her mom would go to the bakery with their bread bag and get fresh bread. The little moments like these were some of her best memories from Spain.
“Any time I’m in Spain, I feel like I’m at home because it was part of my childhood,” May said.
She has gone to Spain several times with students. When she was a former teacher at Jay County Jr-Sr High School, May took students to Spain many times.
She wants to go to Barcelona again and travel all over Spain.
“When I got in high school and started taking Spanish, all of a sudden I could remember all of these words, and then it came back to me,” May said. “I am a Spanish teacher because of the connection and passion.”
Many Spanish IV students’ lives have been impacted greatly because of Spanish class.
Senior Sofia Vaughn, one of May’s Spanish IV students, plans to major in optometry and minor in Spanish. She will be able to help patients who don’t speak English. She found her passion for Spanish in her sophomore year during Spanish II.
“It wasn’t just sitting there doing worksheets, and I can apply this to different things,” Vaughn said. “I was like, what if I took this further? And now it’s my minor.”
In her field of orthodontics, senior Myla Fink will be able to speak to a larger variety of students because she is planning to minor in Spanish. She enjoys the interactivity in May’s class, along with the high energy.
The fun teachers, interactivity and learning about different cultures is why senior Avery Stinson enjoys Spanish. Stinson discovered her love for Spanish in her sophomore and junior years.
“Having that extra language will help build my resume and allow me to speak to other people who maybe can’t speak English,” Stinson said.
