SANTA FE, N.M. (AP) — Before he joined Santa Fe Public Schools, Gary Bass taught English in China, Syria and Vietnam. His students at El Camino Real Academy are aware of his world travels and prone to inquiring about motorbike traffic in Asia or the sounds of a foreign language.
"If they ask me to say something in Chinese, they laugh the way people laugh at things they don't understand," Bass said. "They don't get it that people on the other side of the world are thinking the same thing when they hear their language, that we're all just people trying to get by."
Next month, Bass will take a one-month leave from his classroom to train English teachers at a K-12 school in Kampot, Cambodia, thanks to a scholarship from the Fulbright Program, an international educational exchange program sponsored by the U.S. State Department. Beyond helping Cambodian teachers explain the intricacies of English tenses or subject-verb agreement, Bass said he hopes the experience helps him broaden the world view of his students back home in New Mexico.
"I'm hoping to alleviate some of my own students' stereotypes about people from that side of the world," Bass said. "The world needs people speaking more languages and trying to understand each other better. This is a good chance for me to help that come along a little bit."
Bass said he submitted an application for the Fulbright scholarship in May that included professional references and a few personal essays. He learned he'd been selected in July.
At El Camino Real, a K-8 school of 316 students, Bass speaks both English and Spanish to teach digital literacy classes in which kindergartners learn to click a mouse and middle schoolers write code for video games. The school's bilingual program begins in kindergarten, with 80 percent of the instruction in Spanish. By third grade, class time is split evenly between Spanish language and English language lessons. In middle school, math, science and language arts classes alternate each quarter between Spanish and English.
Bass and his students agree the dual-language model improves students' grasp of both languages.
"When we learn in both languages, it's challenging, especially for people who only know a little Spanish or a little English," El Camino Real seventh-grader Jonathan Alvarez said in Spanish. "But when you're learning new things in Spanish, you're learning new things in English, too. If you learn a new word in Spanish, you can now learn it in English, too."