{"id":1382,"date":"2011-03-31T11:21:05","date_gmt":"2011-03-31T16:21:05","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/social.plymouth.k12.in.us\/perspective\/?p=1382"},"modified":"2014-04-07T07:16:30","modified_gmt":"2014-04-07T12:16:30","slug":"mrs-ippel-shares-her-experiences-new","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/social.plymouth.k12.in.us\/perspective\/?p=1382","title":{"rendered":"Mrs. Ippel Shares her Experiences"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Mrs. Rebecca Ippel is Plymouth High School's ENL teacher. Photo by: Patricia Ortiz<\/p><\/div>\n

By Patricia Ortiz<\/em><\/p>\n

Students may\u00a0perceive 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.<\/p>\n

Mrs. Rebecca Ippel is Plymouth High School\u2019s English as a New Language (ENL) teacher . Mrs. Ippel has lived an exciting life that began with an inspiration to become a teacher. \u201cMy 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\u2019ve had a long string of inspiring teachers, too.\u201d<\/p>\n

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, \u201ctowards the language side of things.\u201d 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. \u201cThat field fit well with my love of teaching, travelling, and learning new languages,\u201d Mrs. Ippel said. \u201cWhen 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.\u201d<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

Aside from teaching in Plymouth, Mrs. Ippel has taught in a variety of places. She taught at Ball State\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

At Ball State Mrs. Ippel taught intensive English classes for international students. Basically she taught separate classes of reading, writing, speaking, listening, and grammar.\u00a0 At Plymouth High School she teaches \u201cclasses where the skills are all combined, and we use content area classes as the basis of the curriculum.\u201d There is one thing that separates the Ball States students Mrs. Ippel taught from the PHS students she teaches. Ball State students were \u201ccoming 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\u2019t get to practice speaking and listening as much.\u201d At PHS students \u201ccome 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.\u201d<\/p>\n

A typical day for Mrs. Ippel includes helping students with homework, and helping students learn vocabulary and content for student\u2019s other classes. \u201cWe 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\u2019m 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,\u201d Mrs. Ippel said.<\/p>\n

Of course not all of Mrs. Ippel\u2019s 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 \u201cplant flowers and vegetables this spring.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

By Patricia Ortiz Students may\u00a0perceive 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.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":178,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1382","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-feature"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/social.plymouth.k12.in.us\/perspective\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1382"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/social.plymouth.k12.in.us\/perspective\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/social.plymouth.k12.in.us\/perspective\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/social.plymouth.k12.in.us\/perspective\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/178"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/social.plymouth.k12.in.us\/perspective\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1382"}],"version-history":[{"count":9,"href":"https:\/\/social.plymouth.k12.in.us\/perspective\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1382\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1420,"href":"https:\/\/social.plymouth.k12.in.us\/perspective\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1382\/revisions\/1420"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/social.plymouth.k12.in.us\/perspective\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1382"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/social.plymouth.k12.in.us\/perspective\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1382"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/social.plymouth.k12.in.us\/perspective\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1382"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}