WELCOME 9X Students!

Dear Student,

Welcome to your first semester of high school! I hope you enjoyed your summer and that you're looking forward to this new semester. Although you might know about some of your classmates from middle school, you and I don't really know much about each other at all. Therefore, I've decided to write to you a little about myself, and you can take your time getting to know who I am.

I come from a small family: my parents, one brother, and me. I am bilingual; I speak German and English. That's because my mother is German and she taught me how to speak the language. My father is African American, so I grew up with two cultures as well as two languages. I was born and raised in Maryland, near Washington, DC, which is almost 3,000 miles from San Francisco. Although I've been to Washington, DC many times, I've never seen a President except on TV!

As far as education goes, I have Bachelor's degrees in Anthropology and German language and culture. I'm also going to be in school this year finishing my Masters degree in Education. So I will be taking two evening classes every week. In addition to teaching 9th grade Ethnic Studies, I've taught 7th grade and 10th grade world history classes, English language development and I've taught German to elementary school kids.

When I'm not at school, I like to travel (I've been to 16 different countries so far). This summer I spent two weeks in Peru digging up artifacts that were over 2,350 years old. I was hoping to find a mummy like the ones I've seen in National Geographic magazines and shows, but the artifacts I found were mostly pieces of ceramics, shells, and some animal bones. I also like to play sports such as volleyball and skiing, cook, paint, read, write letters, watch movies, and listen to music.

The reason I decided to teach Ethnic Studies is because I love learning about other cultures and how we interact with each other. We will spend our lives interacting with other people, and working together is not always easy. People are different. We all have different opinions and ideas, different ways of communicating and listening. All of these differences make us unique and exciting when we interact with each other. In order to work together successfully we need to be aware that we are all different, yet we share many parts of our culture too. We need to respect each other's opinions, even when they are different. We need to listen to each other - open our ears and our minds to others' voices.

I use the pronoun "we" because I must do this as well. I want to listen to what you, as a student, have to say about the class. I want to hear your voice because it might be different than mine. Just as you will learn from each other and from me, I want to learn from you!