Category Archives: Massachusetts

Community Service with Holyoke Homework House

In my final semester here at UMass Amherst, I have been volunteering for two hours, once a week at Holyoke Homework House. Homework house is a national organization that has sites throughout the U.S. One of these locations is in Holyoke, Massachusetts. The organization is a non-profit that provides teachers, and tutors, to underserved communities to function as afterschool caretakers. These teachers and tutors help students with their homework afterschool free of charge. It provides underserved working-class families a place for their kids to go after school while they are at work.

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UMass Spanish STEP Program

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Interested in teaching Spanish after you graduate? You should consider applying for the STEP (Secondary Teacher Education Program) program here at UMass Amherst! The program gives students an opportunity to graduate with a license to teach Spanish (grades 5-12). You’ll work closely with the director of the program to complete the required exams, enroll in the required courses, put together a portfolio that demonstrates your knowledge and experience, and you’ll even be able to student teach during your Senior year! Though it seems daunting, the experience has been an incredibly fulfilling one for me. I love student teaching and it only makes me that much more excited to teach in my own classroom in the future. And don’t worry if you didn’t know about the program early on – I only found out about it halfway through my Junior year.

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Growing through Language

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I first encountered Spanish when I was in fifth grade. I remember it vividly. I had just moved to a new school, and all of my classmates had started Spanish classes in kindergarten, so they were way ahead of me. At the start of my first class, my teacher walked in and began speaking Spanish, and I slouched down in my seat in the hopes that she wouldn’t notice that I was there. She did. She walked over to me and smiled gently when she saw the look of terror on my face. “You’ve never taken Spanish before, have you?” she asked. All I could do was shake my head no.

Throughout the course of that year, my teacher was a constant source of encouragement. She would pull me aside in class and help me with my vocabulary, she stayed after school to help me practice sentence structure and writing skills, and she set me up with an online language software so I could practice speaking the language. These lessons were all very helpful and appreciated, but the best thing that she ever did was start speaking only in Spanish for the second half of the school year. By the end of the year, I was able to read whole stories that I hadn’t been able to understand at all in September. This was the first time that I had ever been exposed to another language, and the first time that I had really stopped to consider what life outside of the United States might be like. This experience opened a whole new door for me. It gave me a sense of confidence in myself, it made me realize that I loved learning about languages and cultures, and it opened my eyes to the possibilities of traveling in the future. Something just “clicked” for me that year. It felt natural to speak a new language, and I knew then that I had to continue with it.

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Latinx Studies at UMass

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It’s safe to say the Spanish Department at UMass Amherst wasn’t what I was expecting. I partly chose this major when I applied because this was my strong suit in High School, but I also chose it because I was inspired by my community. Growing up in the Northampton Public school system just down the road from UMass, I witnessed many levels of racism and classism beginning in elementary school: our classrooms were segregated, with myself and all my other white friends from educated families in one class, and our peers that were black, hispanic, poor, misbehaved, and any combination of these in the other class usually with the older, harsher teacher. In high school, the Spanish speaking students who had recently immigrated from Latin America were taught in one classroom removed from the rest of the student body, and I didn’t know these students’ names for quite some time. I had the honor of befriending these students when we started an after school club for Spanish learners and English learners to converse and practice together. This brought so much joy to both parties and I realized that as long as I was to be a part of a community where there were people learning “my” language, it was my duty to learn theirs.

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Why you should take Spanish in the US

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The first time I was ever truly interested in what I was learning was in the fall of 2021. I was a sophomore in Professor Armstrong-Abrami’s class “Spanish in the US”. The class was a Hispanic Linguistics class that focused on the different dialects of Spanish in the United States, including their history, geography, and linguistic elements. In this class, I became strikingly interested in the dialects of a language and the factors that influence dialects. So much new and captivating information was being thrown at me each class, and I couldn’t get enough of it. What really resonated with me was learning about the history of linguistic discrimination against Puerto Rican Spanish speakers and heritage speakers in Holyoke, along with the lack of educational resources for these speakers. It was happening so close to UMass and I was completely unaware, which made me really want to get involved.

For the final project in this class, I had to do a research project. My group decided to research linguistic discrimination in heritage speakers of both Spanish and Portuguese. We did a pilot study and presented our findings to the class. Professor Armstrong-Abrami loved our project so much that she suggested we continue our research and present at the Massachusetts Undergraduate Research Conference the following semester. So, I enrolled in a research course credit and we expanded on the research, testing more participants and a larger variety of participants. I didn’t know why I was so eager to do research on this at first; I just wanted as much information as I could get. But, sooner or later, I realized that this was my calling. Now, I know it sounds dramatic, but just bear with me. This class opened the door for me in my studies. It made me realize that there are so many things I can do with my major.

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El fútbol y mi vida.

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Viví en México hasta los diez años y aunque mi familia tenía mucha relación con el fútbol (mi abuelo fue presidente del club y de las sedes de los mundiales de 70 y de 86 y uno de mis tíos fue portero profesional y es el director deportivo de los Xolos de Tijuana) yo no lo practiqué porque mi papá no era muy bueno que digamos. Al llegar a Estados Unidos, en New Hampshire ese verano entré a una clínica de soccer con unos entrenadores escoceses. Aprendí inglés mientras también mostraba mis virtudes como jugador. Luego jugué en un club de niños y siempre que competíamos perdíamos. Así vine por vez primera a Massachusetts, a jugar en un torneo. Fue hasta mi primer año universitario que el fútbol se me hizo un gran ejercicio y además empecé a ver el deporte en televisión y a apasionarme por algunos equipos

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Reflecting to connect: bridging my two majors

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“What do you want to do when you graduate?” The inevitable question for all college kids. As an indecisive person with respect to every detail of my life, even the most trivial, this is the question I do everything to avoid. I am a double major in Spanish and public health, two areas in which I feel a lot of passion and curiosity. Everyone always says, “what a good combination!” to which I just nod and smile, not really having considered what makes it so. Before this year, I did not think much about what I could do with both majors post-UMass. Fortunately, I have had the opportunity to reflect on how the two complement each other and what I can do with them.

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Interactions with Local History

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Throughout my education, I have had very little experience with diversity and “real” history until I got to college. Growing up, I lived in a town that had a significant white majority. In fact, according to the Massachusetts Department of Education, 90.8% of my high school was white during the year I graduated. During my primary and secondary education, I was taught to be proud of the pilgrims that “settled” the land I was living on, and of the fishing and whaling industry in New Bedford and how important we were for the world – with little to no mention of the slaughter of natives or of the intense racism that continues to affect my area to this day. In fact, I was taught that the name of my hometown, Mattapoisett, meant “Place of Rest” in Wampanoag – almost like saying, “It was so peaceful here! It’s a place of resting!” I often had to teach myself in high school to find out the true history on my area, and about the atrocities that were committed. Still to this day, I wonder how many lies I was fed and the extent people have tried to cover up the truth.

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When the World Stands Still How Do You Move Forward?

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When the pandemic hit I was in my sophomore year. Like many other college students I was sent back to my hometown, I finished my semester on-line, and was left waiting for the world to return back to “normal”. May rolled around and I felt as though my life was at a standstill. We were restricted by the lockdown and I was able to work at my part-time job at a coffee shop, but every day felt like the last. I was stuck in a monotonous loop of going to work and returning home just to binge watch another show on Netflix or complete another jigsaw puzzle with my family. My life was lacking a challenge and I needed to find a new passion to sink my teeth into.

Since freshman year of college I had been taking cardio kickboxing classes at the Rec and it quickly became part of my weekly routine at school. I had started to form a friendship with the instructor, Jackie, and she introduced me to Kick It By Eliza, the company with which she received her certification. Eliza, the founder of the company actually graduated from UMass in 2013 and has been growing her business ever since. By the time the pandemic hit I had been following Eliza’s instagram account for a few months and saw her posting about their certification workshops, which at the time were only offered in-person during specific times of the year. Getting my Kick It certification had been in the back of my mind leading up to the pandemic, but I always found an excuse to not pursue it: going in person would be tough to fit in my schedule, I don’t have any professional training in fitness and exercising, I don’t have what it takes to teach a room full of people. All of these doubts swirling in my head were finally squashed once the pandemic hit and Kick It By Eliza transitioned to a virtual platform for their classes and certification. When I first saw that they would be offering their certification on-line it felt like the universe was telling me I had run out of excuses, and I signed up for the certification.

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