Welcome to Spanish! My name is Ms. Wilbers and I am a Spanish teacher here at Weymouth High School. This year, I teach Spanish 2 Honors, Spanish 3, and Spanish 3 Honors. Below is all about how I became interested in speaking and teaching Spanish. This website will be up and running soon with homework assignments and much more! Please check back this week to see the new site!

At the age of seventeen, I began teaching a public health curriculum in Latin America to young people through the program, Amigos de las Américas. During my high school summers, I lived and taught in Paraguay and Ecuador in small rural communities. I graduated at Belmont High School in 1994 with an award for excellence in Foreign Language and the Wellesley College Book Award.

At Vassar College, I continued to study education, majored in Spanish, and minored in Latin American Studies. While working towards my teaching certification, I completed a series of high school and middle school internships where I earned a distinction for student teaching and was nominated for the Helen Miringoff Award. The latter award was for community service by the director of the Martin Luther King Cultural Center where I tutored. The first two summers that I was at Vassar, I lived in Latin America, organizing a youth leadership and public health program as a project supervisor in Ecuador and Paraguay. My junior year, I lived in Bolivia and studied Anthropology and Sustainable Development through the School for International Training where I also did an independent project on the violation of human rights of people living with AIDS and HIV. After my junior year at Vassar, I was selected for the Institute of Urban Education where I taught at a middle school in Spanish Harlem in a bilingual program and then lived and worked with bilingual students in Black Rock Forest while teaching them a hands-on ecology program.

After graduating from Vassar, I taught Spanish in Westchester County, New York at Fox Lane High School where I co-chaperoned the trip to Spain. Following that I returned home to Massachusetts to teach Spanish and French at Belmont High School where I received Staff Appreciation and Recognition Award, a parent nominated award. During my time at Belmont, I volunteered as assistant training director of the Boston Chapter of Amigos de las Américas. I helped train high school students from the greater Boston area in Spanish and cross-cultural understanding and public health through a series of weekly meetings and retreats. These volunteers were trained to live and work in Latin America. After my first three years of teaching, I decided to further my education by obtaining a Juris Doctor so that I could further my experience in public interest volunteer work.

While at the Ohio State University College of Law, I continued to study Spanish at a graduate level by supplementing my course load and continued to work with young people. I volunteered at the Street Law Program where I taught young elementary students about the law and I also volunteered at the Dispute Resolution and Youth program where I taught high school students about how to resolve conflicts that they encountered in school. Among many other thing, law school taught me to approach problems more creatively and how to organize material more clearly. And, I have brought these skills back into my classroom.

After law school, I returned to volunteering with young people in the non-profit organization, Amigos de las Américas. As training director for the Greater Boston Chapter of Amigos de las Américas, I worked with the board, parents and young high school students. I wrote the curriculum for the training sessions, ran weekend retreats and was the primary liaison with all of the parents. My job was to prepare 16-18 year olds to travel to Latin America and work as public health volunteers as well as teach them Spanish. I was also selected to train correspondent volunteers from all over the country in Miami, Florida as well as regional correspondent volunteers in Boston, Massachusetts. I traveled to Patzcuaro, Mexico in October of 2004 and to Paraguay in July of 2005 in order to train with training directors from all over the country.

My passions for teaching, working with young people, speaking Spanish, and studying Latin American culture brought me back to the classroom. This is my seventh year of teaching, but my first year here at Weymouth. I would like to thank all my students at Weymouth High School for helping me to make our classroom such a fun place to learn and teach Spanish.