Mrs. Rebecca Ippel is Plymouth High School's ENL teacher. Photo by: Patricia Ortiz

By Patricia Ortiz

Students may perceive teachers as just people who give homework and grade papers. Teachers can be more than what students think. Often teacher’s have life experiences that occur in their everyday lives.

Mrs. Rebecca Ippel is Plymouth High School’s English as a New Language (ENL) teacher . Mrs. Ippel has lived an exciting life that began with an inspiration to become a teacher. “My family have to be my primary inspirations. One of my friends growing up joked that she felt like she needed a library card to come into our house! My parents always had lots of great reading material around, and from an early age I was surrounded by such interesting stuff that I have always loved learning. I’ve had a long string of inspiring teachers, too.”

Mrs. Ippel did not originally graduate from college with a degree for ENL. Originally Mrs. Ippel studied English in college because she loved it. Although she enjoyed literature, Mrs. Ippel tended to lean more, “towards the language side of things.” An opportunity opened up for Mrs. Ippel to teach at a primary school in Uganda, Africa. She seized the opportunity to teach in Uganda and moved there. She taught in Uganda for two years. Once she moved back, she went back to school to teach linguistics and ENL. “That field fit well with my love of teaching, travelling, and learning new languages,” Mrs. Ippel said. “When you are teaching English language learners, it really helps to know something about how languages work. So teaching ENL is the best of both worlds for me — I get to teach, and I get to play with language.”

In Africa Mrs. Ippel had many new experiences. While in Africa, Mrs. Ippel taught a variety of things, including music and English to middle school students. She also taught kids at missionaries.

Aside from teaching in Plymouth, Mrs. Ippel has taught in a variety of places. She taught at Ball State’s University of Intensive English Institute, and the Hope Primary School in Africa. All of the teaching experiences she has had vary from place to place.

At Ball State Mrs. Ippel taught intensive English classes for international students. Basically she taught separate classes of reading, writing, speaking, listening, and grammar.  At Plymouth High School she teaches “classes where the skills are all combined, and we use content area classes as the basis of the curriculum.” There is one thing that separates the Ball States students Mrs. Ippel taught from the PHS students she teaches. Ball State students were “coming as adults from countries where they had studied English for years and had a fairly strong background in reading, writing, and grammar, but they don’t get to practice speaking and listening as much.” At PHS students “come as children from countries where they have studied English for shorter periods of time, and they usually develop speaking and listening skills first. So they tend to be more intimidated by the reading and writing tasks. My students at BSU were really intimidated by having conversations, but my students here are mostly comfortable with that.”

A typical day for Mrs. Ippel includes helping students with homework, and helping students learn vocabulary and content for student’s other classes. “We work on reading and writing a lot, because that is where most students need help. We read books together as a class sometimes, so I’m always looking for books that are very interesting, that students will want to read. We also work on vocabulary– not just learning new words, but learning strategies to develop vocabulary skills. That helps with reading too,” Mrs. Ippel said.

Of course not all of Mrs. Ippel’s life revolves around teaching. In her spare time Mrs. Ippel enjoys knitting and making origami. She also really enjoys gardening and said that she can not wait to “plant flowers and vegetables this spring.”