Letters From Teachers:

• Acting to learn, learning to act
• Born to teach
• Passing on a positive impact
• Why do I teach
• Learning together
• Loving the subject and the students
• Leading through our commitments
• Small victories keep me coming back
• Hands-on interaction draws me to teaching
• Awsome students inspire me
• Myriad reasons draw me to teach
• Taking pride in teaching
• Rediscovering the world through students' eyes
• Students' self-confidence is greatest gift
• Making a difference

Paola Ledezma:

Loving the subject and the students

I am currently in my second year of teaching at Valencia High School, just a few blocks from CSUF in the city of Placentia.

As a teacher, I do not get many chances to let others know what is on my mind (well, except of course in the teachers’ lounge). However, my immediate impulse to write soon ended when I looked at the high stack of papers I had to grade for the weekend. Nevertheless, I thought twice about it and then I decided that the papers that needed to get graded could wait and the writing about my experience could not. I was not going to waste the opportunity of letting my students (in Valencia) read an article about their teacher’s experience with them every day.

I became a teacher because life presented me the opportunities to be one. As an undergraduate student, I became so involved with Spanish literature classes and with the ways my professors taught, that it made me realize that Spanish was a subject I wanted to teach. As I journeyed through the pages of Cervantes, Garcia Lorca and Garcia Marquez, the idea of teaching about their literary works became a mission I wanted to accomplish at the high school level — the level I most feel comfortable with after having worked with groups of teens in my parish.

After graduating from CSUF Fullerton, I finished my credential in one and a half years and was ready to teach Spanish. I became a teacher because I loved my subject, but after two years in the classroom, teaching three different levels of Spanish, I have realized I am a teacher because of my students. I entered the teaching profession passionately in love with Spanish, and even though I still am, my students have become my first passion.

Every day, I enter my classroom with my students in mind. Even though I am not a parent yet, I many times feel like one. Each one of my students is so different in many ways that teaching a curriculum that does not embrace all of their differences is just impossible. Teaching is not an easy job; creating a lesson is truly a work of art. It takes time, dedication and mostly, creativity that sometimes does not come easily. However, I am willing to spend the extra time, creating lessons, grading papers, staying after school and yes, even talking to parents, because my students deserve all of that.

Paola Ledezma,
BA Spanish, '02

Leading through our commitments »