About Me

Hello and welcome to my teaching portfolio! My name is Jamie, and I am from the small beach town of Santa Cruz, California. After graduating from Berkeley in 2018 with a degree in English Literature and Spanish Language, I decided to put those two things together and apply for a position as an English language assistant in Madrid, Spain. I had previously studied abroad in Barcelona for 6 months and improved my Spanish so much that I knew I had to come back and try to become fully bilingual. As a recent college grad with few commitments or professional plans to follow at home, it was quite an easy decision to pack up and move back to Spain.

I spent the summer after graduating working long hours in the food service industry in Berkeley, CA and saving up for my plane ticket and first few months in Madrid. I loved the opportunity to work hard at something non-academic for a change, and learned a great deal about my work ethic as I adapted to new environments. I excelled in teamwork and customer service in the workplace, which bolstered my interest in teaching and motivated me to work harder to get to Madrid. I also took a 150-hour online class to get my TEFL (Teaching English as a Foreign Language) certification, an achievement that helped prepare me for the classroom environment in Madrid as well as private English classes.

I had little teaching experience, my closest previous job being the position I held as a campus tour guide for three years at Berkeley. Although quite dissimilar to teaching an established curriculum in a high school, my work as a tour guide involved many interactions in a mentorship role with hopeful high school students and their parents as they navigated the college application process. For this reason, I was especially interested in teaching a high school age group in Madrid.

Upon my arrival in Madrid, I was placed at IES Ciudad de los Poetas, a public secondary school north of the city center. I was asked to spearhead the Global Classrooms program there, a Model UN debate program I had never heard of, and thus began my work as a Global Classroom language assistant. Given my public speaking experience and my studies in English literature, it was actually quite simple to adapt my skills to this program, although it took a great deal of hard work and time to ensure its success due to my naïveté.