Mrs. Wakefield, a Spanish teacher at Carlsbad High School, takes her language skills beyond just Spanish. Not only does Mrs. Wakefield speak Spanish and English, she also speaks French, Portugese, Italian, German, and Norweigan, a total of 7 different languages.

Her adventure into becoming polylingual took off when she was just in high school. She realized her passion at a young age and used that to her advantage.

“I loved Spanish when I was in high school, and I was getting really good grades in it because I’m a language oriented person and it was just kind of natural,” Mrs. Wakefield said. “And then I thought, ‘Hey, I wonder how I’d do with some other ones?’”

After high school, Mrs. Wakefield attended UCLA, where she would learn most of the seven languages she speaks today. She learned four out of the six romance languages during college.

“I majored in linguistics and Spanish at UCLA, and they required that you have two years of another language besides Spanish or one year of two other languages besides Spanish,” Mrs. Wakefield said. “I’d always wanted to learn French and then I took Portugese as well. Then I thought, ‘Well since I’m this far into the romance languages, let’s try some Italian.’”

Mrs. Wakefield implements all of her different languages into her classroom today. Although she only teaches Spanish, Mrs. Wakefield likes to use examples from elsewhere.

“Mrs. Wakefield uses other languages to show how similar some languages are to each other,” freshman Zach Knudsen said. “She shows us examples from several languages at a time to help us with grammar and vocabulary.”

Mrs. Wakefield often shares photos from her travels all over the world, inspiring her students to go on their own world travels, while still taking time to learn about the world around them.

“It’s amazing to be able to speak different languages because the ability to do so allows one to see the world in a different way, in which everything is acceptable,” Knudsen said. “This inspires me because I would like to see the world in the same way as her.”

Students often find grammar the hardest thing to learn in Spanish class, but Mrs. Wakefield shows her students that these grammar rules are used throughout the world.

“I think if people realize that it’s not just this quirky one language that’s doing this, that there’s this whole global pattern of communication, then it becomes more of a fun game,” Mrs. Wakefield said. “This has applications that are bigger than just this right here right now.”