I have been teaching young people to speak German since I was twenty seven years old. From age twenty-one on, I have been learning German. After all of these years, learning and teaching are still part of what my students and I do every day, and I love it.

I started speaking German in August of 1991. I was twenty-one years old, had a decent grasp of Spanish, despite not having had any formal training, and I heard the German professor was great, so I decided to learn German. Within a few weeks, I had found my new favorite subject, and I've been hooked ever since. I love seeing my students go from being shy children, to young adults able to navigate their way around German speaking countries, without fear or apprehension. I love listening to my students speak to each other, and their German counterparts in German, and I love seeing their non-German-speaking peers look at them with envy, although they would never say anything.

Mostly, I love the fact that students go from an isolated American, to a person with genuine contact and opportunity in a part of the world, about which they had only previously heard, and much of that knowledge contained only part of the story, when it comes to the richness of Germanic culture.