Who is behind this blog?
Me, Álex, a language teacher and communicative mediator, born and raised in Madrid, Spain.
Languages and linguistics are my biggest passion, and teaching surely goes in the second place!
I studied Modern Languages and Literatures (German and Italian) in Universidad Complutense de Madrid. During my Erasmus scholarship in Uniwersytet Warszawski in Poland I got to learn Norwegian Bokmål, and Polish at the Center for the Polish Language and Culture.
After that, while I was working there as a foreign language teacher and IT Egineer, I began learning Mandarin Chinese and Portuguese, and being in the country of Ludwig Zamenhof I decided to give Esperanto a try. I think it was worth it!
After 5 years in the land of Copernicus I came back to Madrid.
Having a deaf father and a hard-of-hearing mother I always wanted to learn Spanish Sign Language or LSE (partly to teach them, but also because it had always been fascinating to me), so I studied Communicative Mediation. Thanks to that I enjoyed an Erasmus+ scholarship to work for 3 months at the Institute for the Deaf in Turin, Italy, where I had the incredible opportunity to discover new ways of teaching and where I could begin learning Italian Sign Language (LIS).
During my studies I also took online courses at the University of Cape Town on Teaching Children with Visual Impairment: Creating Empowering Classrooms and Educating Deaf Children: Becoming an Empowered Teacher; as well as a course at the University of Houston on American Deaf Culture.
And right now... I'm currently taking a course at the University of Georgetown on Sign Language Structure, Learning, and Change, and I'm studying for a master's degree in Universidad Rey Juan Carlos, in Madrid, in order to become a foreign language teacher here in Spain. My goal as a teacher is to make knowledge more accessible and easier to understand and to learn for everyone. I'm interested in methodologies focused on teaching deaf, blind and deaf-blind students, as well as the applications of memetics to language and culture teaching.
Some more stuff about me
· Creativity, Music, Photography and Arts: I love painting (watercolors, oil paintings, crayons and acrylics) and I paint wargame miniatures and build game sceneries. I love ROCK! Industrial rock in particular. Experimental music, jam sessions with friends, concerts, gigs & festivals. For me, there's no weekend plan like going to a concert, visiting a museum or walking around somewhere new and full of street art.
Writing is my secret passion and I dream of publishing a book or two someday. However, I bet that day won't come anytime soon... because what I enjoy the most about writing is to create new worlds, cultures and languages, but not developing character arcs (or not that much). Anyway, I guess that's alright because I also love...
· Board games & role-playing: avid player! Nothing beats an evening of gaming with friends. I've been playing for almost 30 years and I'll never get tired of it. The best is always to create new games and ways of enjoying them, adding elements, inventing new rules or whole new playing systems. Here is where my world-building and language creation passions are let loose (Dr. Esperanto is to blame!).
· Collections: for some reason I tend to collect stuff, such as stamps, coins and videogames. Old coins are a gate to the past and it's fascinating to learn about what was going on in the world during the periods they belonged to.
...and last but not least: Nero, my lovely dog! <3
