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About Me

My name is Laurie Tanner, and I am a Language Arts teacher at Crystal Lake Middle School, where I have taught for the past ten years. The last five years I have worked at developing my students' sense of what lies in their own cultures, and have made various attempts at introducing them to other cultures around the world. 

My own experience with global perspectives has spanned my entire life, from when I was five years old, and confronted with accents too alien for me to understand, after my family moved to Australia. Yes, the kids in the neighborhood spoke the same language as I did, but the way they spoke it was altogether foreign for me. I suppose I must have sounded odd to them as well. In any case, within a year I sounded a lot like they did. That's the nature of adaptation for a young child.

Throughout my life I have traveled to many different parts of the world, and I really believe that the experience of constant adaptation has benefited my life in many ways. Naturally as a teacher I want to be able to continue to explore the world and share experiences with my students, learning with them from people we encounter, stories we hear, and places we can travel to, even if the travel is for the most part virtual. Even here in South Florida however, we can catch glimpses of the way other people view the world, through field trips to festivals and other venues. This site is an outcome of my recent fellowship with Teachers for Global Classrooms, an organization run by the State Department for the purpose of providing teachers with training and field experience in global travel. Please click on the tabs above to find out what I have learned through this program over the past year, and how and why global perspectives are incorporated into the classroom.