Lorna Nelson has been teaching at Charles M. Russell High School for six years.

Even though she has only been teaching at C.M.R. for six years, she has been teaching at the middle schools part time since 1998, she said.

Nelson is one of C.M.R’s Spanish teachers, and the way she fell in love with Spanish was sort of fate.

“My family originally planned on me teaching English and History but before I was five, a friend of my family, was a teacher at the University of Montana. She taught German and Spanish. She gave me my first Spanish dictionary and I was already reading by then,” Nelson said, “and she told me that when she said some words and I repeated them she said that I had a really good accent. So she told me that I should learn how [to speak Spanish], it sparked an interest back then.”

Nelson finds many rewards in her job, especially when past students tell her how important Spanish is to them in the future, she said.

“I think the most rewarding thing is when I see students who have graduated. I see them later on when they’re in college or they’ve graduated from college and they tell me even though they took it because they had to have the credit, that later on when got into college or after college, they discovered that Spanish was a good asset to have. So some of them went back and got minors in Spanish or at least more credits in Spanish and continued on. So that to me is the most rewarding thing. Knowing that I may have sparked something there,” she said.

One of Nelson’s former students Larah Angeles, really appreciated having Nelson as a teacher.

“I appreciated having her as a teacher because she allowed me to learn about the Spanish culture and the language itself,” Angeles said.

She not only appreciated Nelson, but the way she was able to help Angeles learn the language more easily.

“I liked being in her class because she helped me personally. She helped me learn more in a way I could understand and build my knowledge of speaking Spanish,” she said, “she’s very fun when she helped us learned because she would put it in a context that we would understand.”  

Angeles also has advice for new students going to Nelson’s class.
“Go into her class with an open mind, because I’m sure she won’t disappoint you when learning this beautiful language.”