Paul Bass Photo
Foreign Language Teacher of the Year Trudy Anderson at WNHH FM.
Trudy Anderson can tell you four different ways to say pen — in Spanish alone.
Ecuadorians say “esfero.” Mexicans say, “lapiecro.” Carribean Spanish-speakers use the word “pluma,” while those from Spain say, “boligrafo.”
You can hear all four versions in New Haven, where families come from a host of Spanish-speaking countries.
And you find students hailing from many of those countries in New Haven public school classrooms, including Trudy Anderson’s sixth through eighth-grade Spanish class at Nathan Hale School.
Anderson has been teaching Spanish and French in New Haven schools for 30 years. She’s good enough at it that the Northeast Conference on the Teaching of Foreign Languages has named her its teacher of the year.
“I was very surprised. I was humbled,” Anderson, who is 52 and was born in Jamaica, said during an appearance Tuesday on WNHH FM’s “Dateline New Haven.”
She spoke of the value of what she teaches her students: “When you learn another language, it’s like you’re living two lives,” she said. And it helps people understand better those who come from different backgrounds — an important skill for students who will graduate into a globalized, interconnected work world.
Anderson has up to 26 students at one time in a class. She breaks them into smaller groups to learn at their own paces. She also integrates the experiences of people from other cultures into the curriculum: She assigns students, for instance, to visit bodegas or homes of friends to converse in Spanish as homework.
Recently she brought in a friend from Puerto Rico to discuss her childhood — exposing students to someone whose accent and word choices differ from the teacher’s. Instead of translating for students when they get confused, Anderson guides them to the right answer and will “say it a different way until they get it” to help them master the language.
Anderson will next compete in a national final round in November against other regional foreign-language teachers of the year.
Click on the video to watch the full conversation with Trudy Anderson about her career and profession, on WNHH FM’s “Dateline New Haven.”
