Next stop: Spain

Two days.


I told myself several months ago that two days between the end of one trip and the beginning of another would be plenty of time. I was right, kind of. I just returned from Puerto Rico Wednesday night following a wonderful eight-day trip with 25 students and two other teachers. Saturday, tomorrow, I'll take off on my next adventure: A four-week tour of Spain that will take me to 12 different cities and three different regions. It's been a crazy two days, but my REI backpack is finally packed and ready to go, for the most part. I've got a couple of hours in the morning to finish everything before leaving for the airport around 11 a.m.


I'm able to return to Spain this summer for the first time in 14 years thanks to a generous grant from Lilly Endowment Inc. Last fall I decided to apply for one of the teacher creativity grants the Endowment gives to Hoosier educators each year. This summer, 120 Indiana educators were selected to receive Teacher Creativity Fellowships to visit at least 30 states and 40 countries. Funded by Lilly Endowment Inc., the program enables teachers, principals, guidance counselors and school librarians from all over Indiana to take time to pursue their personal interests, explore subjects that intrigue them and just "get away," according to the Web site.


My journey will take me to Roman aqueducts, Moorish palaces, romantic islands, and idyllic sites. My purpose is to fulfill a fourteen-year dream of returning to the country where I fell in love with Spanish. I will digitally document my odyssey.

So why Spain? Most of you who know me well know that I love Latin America, especially South America. A good part of my life has been dedicated to Latin America and I've been blessed to have been able to visit 15 countries since 2001. Latin America has always fascinated me for many reasons and I love visiting there and teaching about it.

But this summer will be a little different.

It's kind of a long story that goes back to 1997. I spent the first 16 years of my life surrounded by cornfields, soy beans, and Hoosier hospitality — the realities of growing up in a rural county in northeast Indiana where everyone knows everyone else, everyone looks the same and folks do not lock their doors at night. Besides my family’s yearly outing to Florida, the world as I knew it revolved around my hometown. I knew nothing about other ways of life, and I was content living in the comfort zone my parents had fostered. My life changed, however, when I entered high school, walked into my Spanish classroom, and began to learn about different cultures, places and people. The world suddenly took on a face as I began to see it through the pictures and experiences of my Spanish teacher. Although my interest in Spanish began to grow, it was still just a class. That all changed, however, when I was 16 and traveled to Barcelona, Spain, for 12 days with my teacher and classmates. It was then that I fell head over heels in love with everything Spanish — the language, the music, the architecture, the geography and the people. I now realize it was the defining moment in my life that set the stage for where I am today — a Spanish teacher by trade but someone who still longs to see and understand more of the world. Despite such a life-changing experience, I have never returned to Spain since that 12-day trip in June 1997. Since then I have yearned to go back so I can learn more about the place that inspired my life’s work and first awakened my enthusiasm for other cultures.

I will devote four weeks to an odyssey around Spain to experience four different regions as I immerse myself in a quest to better understand the people, the food, the architecture, the history and the language. This trip will take me across central, southern, and eastern Spain, traveling hundreds of miles on trains, buses, planes, boats and my feet, enabling me to see firsthand the regional differences in Spain — from the land where Don Quixote fought against the windmills to the Mediterranean coast where modernist-style architect Antoni Gaudí decorated a city with his extraordinary edifices.

As I journey, I want to photograph the places and people I meet. I also want to capture video of Spain’s cultural treasures, such as La Sagrada Família in Barcelona, Segovia’s elegant Roman aqueduct, Córdoba’s outstanding mosque, the gastronomical delicacies I sample, and much more, so that my students see more than just pictures in a textbook that mean little to them. I hope that my pictures will come to life through the stories I tell. Additionally, I want to interview people I meet along my journey and have them explain everything from the history of La Alhambra to how to make a Spanish omelet. I will keep a journal about my adventures in Spanish and English and incorporate my writings into my classes as I teach grammar, vocabulary, and culture. I also plan to write about Spain in my weekly column for The News-Banner (http://www.news-banner.com/) once I return in August.

As a sophomore in high school, I promised myself that once I became fluent in Spanish I would return to Spain so I could better understand the culture. Right now, I have learned nearly everything I know about Spain from textbooks and articles, but I long to experience this country again in person — the place that single-handedly turned me on to Spanish. I believe that I do my students a disservice when I teach about Spain because my current knowledge is so limited. Because I think it is important for students to have a teacher with as much travel experience as possible, I want to return to my classroom next year as excited, energized, and rejuvenated as that 16-year-old boy back in 1997. My work is so much more to me than just a job; it defines who I am, the motivation that gets me out of bed each day. As a result, I hope that my pictures, videos and stories from Spain will bring my curriculum alive for my students — and reawaken in me a passion that has been dormant for too long.

My desire to learn more about Spain in order to become a better teacher and improve my Spanish-skills represents only part of my reason for this proposal. Traveling abroad and spending an extended period of time in a country rejuvenates me because I get to meet new people, hear their stories, and experience their culture. Because of technology, my generation has become more connected than any other; Facebook, for example, recently boasted having more than one-half billion users worldwide. Yet, despite this abundance of social media, we’ve actually grown farther apart because people don’t take time to sit down and talk anymore. Although I am just as guilty, I desire to escape from my 15-hour workdays for one month and take time to become acquainted with the people and the places I will encounter. I want to reconnect with people face to face and bring these encounters back to my classroom where my immersion in Spanish life will convert into face-to-face interaction with students.

When my students learn about my journey to South America, for example, I find them curious about my experiences. They always want to know more as they see my pictures, hear my living stories, and view video clips I show. I want to be able to provide these same opportunities, but from Spain — to show, not just tell, as we study grammar, literature, vocabulary and culture. I want students in my classroom to discover that the textbook is not the world, but the world is our textbook. My goal as a language teacher is to encourage my students to have the courage to step out of their comfort zones and travel abroad so they, too, can see that the Hispanic world is neither better nor worse than our culture, but instead just different. Because I try to model this in my life, my trip to Spain will help reinforce this message in my classroom. It will also rejuvenate me as I teach this idea to help students make connections between their culture and others. Teaching students to make connections is perhaps the biggest part of our jobs as educators, and I long to continue this calling but with the same passion that a 16-year-old boy demonstrated after his journey to Spain in the late 1990s.

So there you have it, the point of this journey and how it all came about. My hope is to update this blog every few days to keep you up to date about my travels and post pictures of the places I am visiting. I hope you'll find this blog interesting.

If you decide to follow along on my journey or view my blog from time to time, please let me know. It's always inspiring to know that family, friends, students, parents, colleagues and others are following my journey through Spain.

Let the journey begin!