Portageville woman visits Peru to help become better teacher

Heather Ray, of Portageville, Mo., traveled to Peru and back this summer and participated in the Southeast Regional Professional Development Center's Migrant and English Language Learner summer school program. (Submitted photo)

PORTAGEVILLE, Mo. -- Southeast Missouri State University graduate student Heather Ray of Portageville, Missouri, has traveled to Peru and back this summer and participated in the Southeast Regional Professional Development Center's Migrant and English Language Learner (MELL) summer school program, all in an effort to immerse herself in the Spanish language so she can better connect with her students in Hornersville, Missouri, when classes reconvene this fall.

Ray, a 2015 Southeast graduate of the College of Education's alternate certification program and currently pursuing her master's degree in secondary education, spent three weeks earlier this summer in Cusco, Peru, as part of a Spanish Immersion Program with Maximo Nivel, a professional organization operating locally-based educational institutes in Central and South America.

For Ray, who just completed her second year of teaching seventh and eighth grade science at Senath-Hornersville Middle School, learning Spanish is important for her to communicate with her students and their parents. The middle school serves a large farming community with many migrant workers, and for children and adults alike, English can be a difficult second language.

"My first year of teaching, I started picking up on some concepts that the students are missing in the traditional classroom," Ray said. "I saw that when they didn't understand something, they would translate it back to Spanish, but when they would do that, it would change the meaning."

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