Born in Lima, educated in the United States, I have lived in Canada most of my adult life. My professional life has been both inside and outside the classroom. First as a Spanish teacher at College Edouard-Montpetit, then as an author of content-based materials for the Spanish classroom. My books and thematic units for Spanish all have an underlying philosophy: that knowledge of the "Other" will make a better world. My personal history is the focus of my latest work, Walter's Welcome. This book tells the story of my uncle, Walter Neisser who with extraordinary effort, saved the lives of over fifty people. All were able to escape Hitler's Germany and settle in Peru. Acceptance and inclusion, something I have written about in Spanish, is an important theme in this new work. For the last twenty years, I have written Spanish cultural, classroom resources under the name Miraflores. My personal philosophy is that the more we know about other cultures, the more we empathize with them. Fear or mistrust of the "Other" is linked to lack of information. Thus, I have been as eclectic as possible and have written units for many tastes and four levels of language study that include sports, high and low art, history, ecology, geography, daily life and more. My units range from Botero and Borges to baseball in the Dominican Republic and white storks in Spain. My experience has shown that teachers are most comfortable with the subjects they know about. They like to teach about the Mexican muralists and avoid touching anything about Paraguay. My units are normally paired, to encourage them to work on a human rights activist like Violeta Parra and consider who lived in Córdoba one thousand years ago. We can make our world a better place by accepting and understand all peoples.
