Tonya Russell, a graduate of Galway High School in 2006 and a graduate of SUNY Plattsburgh, recently secured a job teaching English in France.  She lived in France for five months in 2009 and loved the cities she visited there.  She found Mount Pillar and Monsay more appealing than the big city of Paris.  She also found speaking French in a classroom is different than the reality of speaking it in its native country.

She is looking forward to working at a high school in France.  She has lots of experiences teaching little kids but has not worked with teenagers before.  She is apprehensive about the behavior problems she anticipates could arise and she is nervous she won’t know all the answers!  She is afraid of the dark and rodents too but she anticipates working in a rodent-free room with ample light.

Tonya’s favorite Galway memories include Spirit Week, One Acts, track, cross country, reading in the comfy chairs in Mrs. K’s room, the senior prank, and hiking Mount Marcy.  She continues to hike, read poetry, and write.  She also is now well versed in swing dancing and blues dancing.

One of her pet peeves is when people can’t fully engage in conversation; she doesn’t like when someone she is talking to uses short sentences and a lot of okays.  It will be interesting to hear whether her experiences teaching English as a second language to high school students forces her to engage in a lot of conversations that contain short sentences and head shaking.