Silvia Alvarez

Hola, me llamo Miss Alvarez.

As a kindergarten teacher, Silvia Alvarez has an easy time laughing at work.

She can thank her students for that.

“Sometimes the little ones, they have experiences that just make me laugh,” said Alvarez, who teaches in West Liberty as part of a teacher exchange program. “Just watching them tell stories and playing with each other can be so funny.”

There was the time when Alvarez told one of her students to go to the secretary’s office where the student’s mother was waiting to pick him up. But instead the student went to the nurse’s office for no apparent reason.

Alvarez didn’t think any thing of it until the secretary came to her classroom asking the whereabouts of the student.

“I sent him to go the secretary and he knew where it was,” Alvarez said. “But the secretary said, ‘No he is not here.’

“I was worried because I was in the middle of a lesson with my kindergarten children.”

Worry turned to laughter when Alvarez learned that the student had gone to the nurse’s office instead.

“He was at the nurse wondering why he was there and the nurse was asking the same,” Alvarez said. “It made me laugh because I couldn’t figure out why he went to see the nurse.”

Alvarez also laughs when her students try to be leaders by imitating what she does in front of the classroom.

“They say, ‘I’m Miss Alvarez now,’” she said. “They take little pointers that I use for them and try to use them as a leader.

“They speak in Spanish, too, because I’m in the dual-language program. It’s funny in both languages.”

— Pat Harty

Iowa City Press-Citizen -- March 12, 2009