For the past ten and a half years, Spanish and ELD teacher Meagan Hearne has been a staple of the 2000 hallway. But she hadn’t always wanted to be a foreign language teacher.
“I spent my freshman year as a psych major because I took psychology in high school and I thought I really liked it,” Hearne said. “I like to know how the brain works. I took it for a year and I realized it’s not what I thought it was and I wasn’t as interested”
Afterward, Hearne began to pursue a double major in Spanish and education.
“I minored in Spanish for my freshman year because I really like it,” Hearne said. “When you find something that you’re interested in and good at, you should keep doing it. So I thought that I’d make that my major and teach it because I also wanted to coach.”
Hearne describes how her teaching career began.
“My first school I taught at was in a tiny little town in Southern Illinois called Fairfield,” Hearne said. “I spent three years there. Then I came back up to Shelbyville, which is where I’m from, so that I could move closer to home.”
But she didn’t teach in Shelbyville for very long.
“I was only at Shelbyville for a year,” Hearne said. “Then I spent 13 years over at Rushville, and then I came here.”
Although she’s primarily a Spanish teacher, Hearne recently started teaching ELD classes.
“Typically it’s a resource, but for the first 15 minutes of the class, I teach English grammar,” Hearne said. “Usually we specify like one particular thing, like working on capitalization, because in Spanish, like days of the week, they don’t capitalize unless it starts a sentence. However, they’re proper names in English.”
At one of her previous schools, she also taught a course in etymology.
“I loved it so much because it gets into the dynamics of a word and what it means,” Hearne said.
While she ended up enjoying it, she was initially unsure about the subject.
“I had never taken etymology,” Hearne said. “So when I was asked to teach it, at first I was like, ‘I don’t know anything about bugs,’ because I was one of those people who thought etymology and entomology have to be the same thing.”
According to Hearne, many of her students ended up learning a lot in the class, too.
“A lot of those kids have also taken Spanish,” Hearne said. “So once they look at a word, especially if it’s a Latin-based word, they start making those connections.”
Along with loving the subjects she teaches, she also finds happiness in being able to connect with her students.
“Maybe it’s about a sport or it’s about their job or it’s about something that they’re interested in outside of school,” Hearne said. “I love that connection and I love the humor that I get to share with them.”
However, there are some aspects of her job that are frustrating to her.
“I feel like in education, we are continually asked to lower the bar,” Hearne said. “It’s not anything pointed at administrators or anything like that. It usually comes down from the state.”
Hearne suggests a better way to make decisions about education.
“I would put that in our local hands, like our administrators’ hands,” Hearne said. “We know what we need and they’ve hired a pretty good staff.”
Despite the few things she wishes she could change, Hearne says she finds joy in her job.
“I very much enjoy the time I spend with my students, even on the rough days,” Hearne said.