My name's Heather and I grew up in Utah my whole life. My parents only speak English, so the only other language I heard growing up was the few words of French that my grandmother remembers from her mother. However, that was enough to make me excited to start learning French in eighth grade, which I studied throughout high school as well. My senior year I joined the first Ancient Greek language class taught at my school. My teacher passionately loved teaching Greek and so she did more than just teach us about the language itself. She structured the class in such a way that the conversation naturally flowed from the words that we were learning to interesting connections between Greek and a variety of other languages that she'd studied. During that year, I realized just how much my teacher knew about Greek, Latin, linguistics and different societies around the world and her passion sparked an interest in me.
My interest in language was further developed when my teacher assigned me a "recreational" research paper. She didn't give me any constraints about my topic, and instead of picking something in a science related field, as would be natural to me, I decided to take advantage of my teacher's expertise. For a few weeks I got to study the Proto-Indo-European (PIE) society and the its language, mostly from the book The Horse, the Wheel and Language by David W. Anthony.The most fascinating part of this research was the fact that there is no record of the PIE language. Historians now still debate where the PIE people lived, though many agree it was probably in the Eurasian steppes. Most of what I studied was derived from pure inference based on languages that are spoken today. PIE is the common ancestor of so many languages spoken today and consequently linguists have been able to partially reconstruct the mother language from words spoken today. Other than just the language, historians and linguists together have been able to learn so much about PIE society from the language. Interestingly, many scholars now believe that it was the PIE society that first invented the wheel and rode horseback. These were huge steps for mankind and I love how language can reveal so much about a dead society.
Aside from my basic research about PIE, I've also been involved in teaching ESL classes. Though I don't fluently speak a different language, I volunteered with the Guadalupe VIP program, which focuses on teaching adults "survival English" to help them get jobs and live in the United States. This was an excellent program and I enjoyed helping out every week. Honestly, I think I learned more than they did. Part of our discussion every week focused on comparing the US culture to the cultures that my students were familiar with. I had students from Central and South America, as well as Vietnam, and Africa occasionally. I truly enjoyed working with such a diverse group. As a result I was made aware of the struggles that many people go through if they don't understand the language of the country they live in. This can be a huge barrier sometimes but teaching ESL made me realize the importance of breeching that barrier.
