También puedes leer este artículo en español, La Maestra de Inglés con Corazón Mexicano.

When she went out with her blonde children, people thought she was the babysitter. At the school where she teaches, they mistook her for a cleaning lady. Aida Aguilar Kuettle, from Morelos, Mexico, is the director of the English for Speakers of Other Languages (ESOL) program at Morrilton High School in Central Arkansas. There she has students from every continent except Antarctica.

She came to Arkansas invited by relatives to spend time learning English in a small town near De Queen. She came in 2000 and she's still in Arkansas. She met the man of German descent who would become her husband and since then she has lived "in the Anglo world of my husband and in the Hispanic world of my family."

In Mexico she was studying the sixth semester of industrial relations, a career that requires learning English. In Arkansas "I no longer wanted to study business but to help people who wanted to study English."

To do so, she needed a Spanish educator license. She graduated from the University of Central Arkansas and was a distinguished student. She later obtained a master's degree in teaching Spanish Literature and she is now studying for a doctorate in Leadership in the Promotion and Care of Inclusion.

The first thing was to become a teacher. “The high school was looking for a Spanish teacher and then they realized that I could help ESOL students,” she recalls. Aida has been running the department for five years and one of her memories is one of her students, a little boy who came to ask how to make change and do arithmetic in English. The boy was learning English to teach it to his mother.

Aida is also a basic Spanish teacher at the Morrilton Community College; 26 of its students have received Arkansas' highest honor for language learners.