Making Spanish Sweeter

From Lima to New York, theater student to store clerk, Spanish teacher Frida Ambía has a wealth of experiences to share. Even though she grew up in a small town in Peru, Ambía was exposed to theater, dance, and art classes thanks to her beloved Aunt Juanita, who had the money and connections in the Department of Education to get classes for her niece.

Ambía grew up around many of her relatives in her grandparents’ house, alongside a number of animals ranging from chickens to sheep to guinea pigs. Without television or the Internet, the town’s children went door to door to gather enough people to play together, revealing a tight-knit community. This might explain Ambía’s playfulness in the classroom: she often jokes or plays games such as charades with her students, improving their skills while also engaging with those who might feel uncomfortable with a new language. Her classrooms quickly become communities where students can laugh and learn together in a relaxed, supportive environment.

Ambía’s career choice makes a lot of sense to those who look to her family: five of her aunts and uncles were teachers, including Juanita. Also tying in to her career is her passion for the Romance languages, such as the Italian and Portuguese she studied, in addition to her native Spanish, since coming to New York at the age of 12.

Ambía’s spent her teenage years in America, though she always maintained close ties to her Spanish roots and artistic upbringing, participating in the dance group “Así baila mi Perú” (This is How My Peru Dances) and acting in a Spanish production of Huasipungo, a native Andean play. She then went to Hunter College, where she pursued her interest in Spanish language and culture while studying to become a teacher. The most interesting portion of her life, however, are the jobs she held while earning her bachelor’s degree. Ambía worked as a tutor and an assistant to the Dean of Romance Languages at Hunter, while working as a cashier and clerk at health food shops and Putumayo, a store dedicated to spreading the culture of Latin American communities through various pieces of clothing, food, and music.

Ambía’s jubilant spirit was visible even then: “I loved pretending I was a mannequin on the window display and startling the drunk Saint Patrick's day parade-goers, who would insist that the mannequin had moved, but [I] was perfectly still when everyone else looked—they were all drunk, so they couldn't tell.”

This sense of humor has ever since been incorporated into her teaching career at Stuyvesant, which is now 19 years long and is going strong. Before coming to Stuyvesant, she taught at Seward Park and Norman Thomas High Schools, both of which have been now phased out and were very different from Stuyvesant. “[Stuyvesant] students are eager to learn, and they do it quite fast,” she said. This allows her to devote less time to getting students’ attention and more time to creating fun class activities.

These activities, such as short dance lessons or skits, are what makes Ambía’s classes stand out, as they weave Spanish culture into the curriculum. She frequently puts on performances, plays Spanish songs relating to the current lessons, and encourages students to dance along to the beat, reviving the love of theater and dance that has remained with her since childhood.

When asked about why she thinks teaching Spanish is important, she responded with an unexpected comparison to the movie “Avatar”: “There's a part where the follicles connect to some neural network, and [the characters] can understand each other at a more profound level.” In this way, she helps bring a diverse city a little closer together.

In addition to her love of teaching and dedication to sharing her culture, Ambía has a variety of interests that seem greatly influenced by her past. For example, her fascination with nutrition and health goes back to the ways of her paternal grandparents, who frequently created their own remedies and used more traditional cooking techniques with natural ingredients. “Things like not overcooking the veggies, not frying things, avoiding artificial seasonings, not over sweetening things,” she shared. This explains her choice of work with health foods (though she does enjoy baking a few sweets once in a while). She also loves reading, meditation, and self-care. “My house is full of herb books and natural healing books,” she said. She also enjoys writing, yet she has less time to do so now than when she was in college, where she had poems and an article published in Spanish.

In a final snippet of educational wisdom, Ambía advises new teachers to reflect their own personality in how they teach: “When you do you, you're happy, and your joy will spread to the class.”