Verde Valley School Spanish teacher Lianne Lydum, who is in her ninth year with the school, was named one of the International Baccalaureate Schools Program Teachers of the Year during the organization’s recent meeting.

“I feel like I’m representing language teachers in the state [with] an award like this,” Lydum said. “I’m excited to be recognized for something that I feel so strongly and passionate about.”

“[Lydum] is not only an outstanding Spanish teacher, but she also is one of our mountain biking coaches. She is an avid trail runner, and she often does that with the kids,” Head of School Ben Lee said. “She’s also an outstanding musician. She plays guitar, sings, and so she is a frequent contributor to our campus amateur musical endeavors.”

“We always warm up at the beginning of my Spanish classes with a song,” Lydum said. “Because it helps them with their pronunciation in a way that’s fun. And they don’t have to know what they’re saying, even though we do go through what the song’s about. But just as long as they’re signing it the way they hear it being said … it gets them to enjoy using the language.”

Born in Los Angeles, Lydum’s family moved to Navojoa in southern Sonora, Mexico, when she was 12. Lydum earned her bachelor’s degree in industrial engineering from the Instituto Tecnológico de Sonora before working for General Electric and having a son and daughter. However, when she was 40, she decided she wanted a new career and would go on to earn her master’s degree in teaching Spanish from Northern Arizona University.

After graduating from NAU in 2013 she decided to teach in Boston and Providence Rhode Island before starting at VVS.

“[My son and daughter] both graduated from Flagstaff High School … then decided as adults that they wanted to go back to Mexico,” Lydum said. “I’ll go back and visit them, so even though there’s a lot that I love about the U.S. and being in the United States, I am kind of this hybrid person that needs both countries to feel complete.”

She said that her background in industrial engineering involved creating efficient processes and being organized and that much of that mindset still informs her day-to-day work, such as watching language use evolve.

“What I tell my students is that languages are alive and they evolve over years,” Lydum said. “If we look back if and watch a movie from the ‘80s, we don’t talk like that anymore. People take ownership of the language and evolves. I’ll tell my students they are the keepers of the language in the future, and [language] is going to be whatever they want it to be.”

“The biggest thing that I noticed was the expression ‘no worries’ or ‘you’re good,’” Lydum said of changes in American English during the 28 years she was out of the country. “We never said that before I left the country, because we always said, ‘no problem’. So when people would say ‘no worries,’ I was asking what do they mean? Because I’m not worried. There were a lot of little things like that were different from what I was used to.”

Lydum has also started learning Korean “because I want my students to see that I preach about the benefits of learning but I want to show that I’m going to practice what I preach, and take up the challenge of learning another language,” Lydym said. “Because Italian or French could be pretty easy for me to pick up in a few months. They’re very similar languages, but Korean is so different. And so I’ve been learning so much about the culture … and immediately I can see the world in a different way just by learning this thing.”

Lydum anticipates that it will take her three years to become fluent, but said that it has been beneficial for her as a language teacher to understand the challenges that her students have in their learning.

“Learning a language helps the individual, but globally, it helps us understand other people,” Lydum said. “The way things are in the world today, if we’re able to understand other people in other cultures better through language learning it’s going to make the world a better place.”

Recently, she received an email from a graduate who had taken one of her higher-level Spanish classes. The student is studying in Spain and talked about how the class had left a lasting impression on him.

“We read a book by the Spanish author Federico García Lorca who was a playwright,” Lydum said. “García Lorca wrote these three plays, and one of them is ‘The House of Bernarda Alba.’ My former student said he looked into it and he emailed me a week ago that he had the opportunity to go visit [the house the play was based on] and that he was going to take pictures of it to send to me. It was just cool to see this is something we did in class and to have students find ways that it continues to spill into their life.”