About Me

INTRODUCTION

Hello all!  My name is Ally Kamphuis and I am finishing my final year here at Grand Valley.  I study Secondary Education, Spanish, and English, and I am beyond excited to start my career as an educator of a foreign language.  I am currently a teacher assistant in three 10th grade Spanish classrooms at Rockford High School.  I learn so much about the students and about teaching in general every single day.  In my free time, I absolutely love to exercise - especially running (it helps me to de-stress) - and I also love to play with my dog.  I have been a waitress at Russ’ Restaurants (at one of the locations in Holland) for 5 years.  I am probably one of the few people in the world who will admit to loving waitressing.  I am such a people person, and having a job where I can talk as much as I want to AND get more money for doing so is something I never thought possible.  I find the same joy that I find when waitressing while teaching, but I feel as if there are more benefits involved in teaching, especially the feeling I get when I help a child who has been struggling.

This video shows a little more about me :). An interesting period of my life was when I studied abroad in Spain for a semester, and some of the pictures are featured in the video. Living in Spain and experiencing the Spanish culture firsthand was an indescribable feeling, and I am so glad that I was blessed with the opportunity.
 

FUN-FACT

I have always had a knack for languages; they make sense to me the way math makes sense to some people.  When I was a child, I was so drawn to languages that I started to dissect them and put them together in different ways in my head.  From this, I acquired the skill of talking backwards.  Anything that I can say normally, I can also say in reverse.  I used to do this involuntarily in my head for years, and for a long time I thought that it was something that everyone could do.  Once I discovered that it was not normal, I shared this skill with my friends and quickly became a spectacle for many of my classmates.  I can still speak backwards nowadays, but I don’t do it nearly as much as I used to.

EXPERIENCE WITH TECHNOLOGY

Honestly, I don’t have much experience using technology in the classroom.  Sure, I have created many, MANY powerpoints and other presentations, but I have never used a Smartboard or any other advanced pieces of technology in the classroom.   I would be interested in learning about more technological options for a Spanish classroom, because most of the equipment I can think of is more commonly used in math and science classrooms.