Laurie Mentgen is a new ESL teacher at West Chicago Community High School this year.
Mentgen started her initial search for a teaching job near her home, which led her to West Chicago Community High School. Mentgen was drawn to the school’s website, particularly a video of teachers rewarding students, which gave her tears.
“I was drawn to the school due to its strong sense of community. I felt a strong connection to the school and decided to apply for a job there,” Mentgen said.
Mentgen pursued a Master’s in teaching at Aurora University, which led her to the sociology umbrella. Initially, Mentgen was seeking a social studies job, but found it challenging. Despite the difficulty in locating a job in her desired subject, she found ESL teaching fulfilling and enjoyable.
“Finding a social studies job is really hard because there’s a lot of social studies teachers out there. But I think it was kismet,” Mentgen said.
Before landing at WEGO, she taught English in South Korea for two years, so she has experience working with non-English speaking students. Although she says sometimes it is challenging to communicate with her students, she considers herself really animated, as she uses her face a lot, and incorporates a lot of pictures to communicate with her students.
“I’ve been in many situations in my life where I’ve had to like pantomime in order to communicate with people and draw pictures. So I find ways, but it is challenging. I have a student right now who’s from Nigeria, and the language that she knows, not a lot of people speak that language, so I can’t translate anything because it’s just not an option on Google Translate. So that’s difficult, but I’m not worried about her, because she’s already progressing so much, and it’s only been a few weeks,” Mentgen said.
Meanwhile, Mentgen is enjoying learning from her students.
“Students, for example, taught me what skibidi meant, and I didn’t know. So it’s like things like that that I’m learning on a daily basis,” Mentgen said.
She is looking forward to the coming years at WEGO.
“I really want West Chicago to be my home. I’m hoping that I will work here for a very long time,” Mentgen said.