Chloe Baker, the newest edition to the Rice language department, has spent her life gaining and sharing perspectives.  After spending her childhood immersing herself in stories, she found herself enamored with the Spanish language.  Her love of both literature and language have surrounded her with a deep interest in the world and all it has to offer.

Baker was raised in Sacramento, California.  From there, she moved to Vermont to study at Middlebury College, where she was given the opportunity to study abroad.  Baker spent time in Uruguay, Spain, Italy, and Rome.  Within these trips, she gained an incredible sense of the world that she tries to share with her students.  Baker sees multiple sides to every story and uses that as a tool in the classroom.

Why did you want to become a teacher?  Did you have any inspiration for it?

“I was blessed to have some very incredible teachers, and I know what it is like to struggle with learning, so I wanted to help students with that[…]. The goal is always to get better.”

What did your love of books stem from and when did it start?

“It wasn’t a love originally, it was just stubbornness.  Reading was very difficult for me.  Even though my native language is English, I struggled with it a lot, and so it was very much just stubbornness[…]. My love of stories came from listening to my mother read novels.  She would read me, like, Harry Potter, Wrinkle in Time, these big books, not the small children’s ones.  And that really gave me just the love for stories.”

What interested you about Spanish?

“I approached Spanish with the same stubbornness that I approached English.  It was something that was hard [so] that when I went to college, I knew I wanted to study Spanish because it was the only thing that I’d found in high school that was really hard[…]. I really had to work at it, and so that was important to me.”

Are your loves of the Spanish language and literature connected?

“Yeah.  Because my love of language also comes from this deep well of stubbornness, but also this love of stories and Spanish is a different way of looking at the world, not just only from, like, a grammatical standpoint, but from a very hotel standpoint.”

Did you always know you wanted to teach Spanish?

“Yes, I knew I wanted to teach it, because I originally wanted to be a tutor[…]. But I really became a teacher because I started a master’s program, and I met so many incredible teachers, and it just felt like, wow, they’re making a difference, and I want to do so too.”

What was going to Uruguay like?

“Uruguay had closed its borders during the pandemic, so there were very few people coming in and out of the country.  There were virtually no tourists.  And so it was just really tranquil, very laid back.  And it was a very small group of us.  We started out with six students and ended the program with five, so my biggest class had six students.  So that meant that there was a real sense of community, and I really enjoyed that.  I had some amazing professors, and overall, it was just the best thing I could have done.”

What was living in Rome like?  What kind of classes did you take there?

“Rome had so much history, just the amount of culture and museums and turning down an alleyway and finding a 600-year-old monastery.  It was just incredible.”

“My favorite [class was] called The City of Rome, which was, like, a history-slash-culture class.  We took a lot of field trips in that one and then walking, walking art.  So we would literally just walk around the city into random churches.  And then the professor would be like, hey, so this is a Caravaggio painting.  And so we wandered into random museums.  We went to the aqueducts, which are on the outcrops of the city.  One day we saw a bone church, which was super cool.”

Did any of your experiences make you want to become a teacher more?

“Yeah?  Because I really want to encourage people to, like, see what’s outside of the United States.  There’s so much to see, so much to learn, but also there’s some really interesting, different perspectives.  One of the things I got to do in Madrid was listen to random Spanish news.  I had my daily news podcast in Spanish, and it was a very Spanish perspective on world events, and they would talk about stuff in the US.  It was super funny because they’d be like, ‘Oh, yeah, a totally different side to the story.’”

What is your favorite thing about teaching?

“Being able to watch a student progress because there are certain students, especially in Spanish 2, that [I was] really worried about in the beginning of the year because they didn’t quite have the same level of foundation as their peers.  And then to watch them really grow and get more confident and to see their improvement over the course of this year has just been really exciting.