Spanish teacher Leigh Rysko was screaming her lesson for the day.
This was a daily occurrence at the all-girls Catholic school in the middle of the Peruvian Amazon rainforest, where Rysko taught English for a year.
With the roar of motorcycles coming from just outside the school, she had no option but to speak as loudly as possible in the humid classroom with no air conditioning.
“I had students for whom what I was teaching was their way to success, or their way to get out of the economic situation in which they found themselves,” Rysko said. “[There were] all these challenges, and yet students were like ‘No, we need English,’ and they were highly motivated.”
Ever since her time as a high school student at SM East in room 516, the room she teaches in now, Rysko felt confident in her Spanish-speaking abilities.
However, Rysko's true passion for Spanish started after spending two months of her high school junior year volunteering in the luscious forests of Costa Rica with the Amigos de las Americas volunteer program.
“It was clear I wanted to teach,” Rysko said. “And my time in Costa Rica made it clear what subject.”
While pursuing her teaching degree at Denison University, Rysko decided to study abroad in Toledo, Spain, during the fall semester of her senior year.
With narrow, cobblestone roads and Gothic architecture, Toledo was Rysko's first experience in an historic international city. She studied at a small local university with other American and Japanese students.
“I actually arrived a week late, and so everyone else had already had the first week of icebreakers,” Rysko said. “I just remember tears rolling down my face.”
After finishing her senior year of college, Rysko moved to San Diego, California and began teaching high school Spanish.
Three years into the job, she decided to pursue her master's degree and spent two consecutive summers in Madrid to complete her coursework.
One week before her program was set to end, Rysko met her now wife, Isabel Betancur, who only spoke Spanish.
“[We] have a long history,” Betancur said. “We met in 2003, then met up again…[and began] long distance.”
After Rysko had finished her time in Spain, she continued to work in San Diego and applied for a teacher exchange, hoping to be placed back in Spain with Betancur.
However, with Rysko’s already extensive list of experience in Spain on her resumé, she was sent to the all-girls Catholic school in Peru.
“I was disappointed for about five minutes,” Rysko said. “[But] who's going to say no to that?”
For a year, Rysko spent time teaching English to girls in a city in the middle of a rainforest, with the only form of transportation being planes or boats.
While teaching, she began to stand up for the affordability of girls' schooling and even joined a committee to encourage local motorcyclists to install mufflers on their engines, helping to quiet the roads.
“I was frustrated to tears,” Rysko said. “I know my students want what I have to give them, and [I wasn't] able to do it, so I reached out to a bunch of people who helped me advocate for my students.”
After returning from Peru, Rysko decided to move back to Kansas City and taught at SM South for 13 years.
She then took a sabbatical to decide whether she and Beancur would live in Spain or Kansas City. To be near Rysko’s family, they both decided on Kansas City.
This is now Rysko’s second year teaching Spanish at SM East, the same place where she learned the language.
“I remember being in [room] 516, and I remember my classmates talking about [Amigos de las Americas] for the first time,” Rysko said. “To be in that classroom where I heard about my first life-changing program is really special.”
She teaches Spanish 2, 4 and the highest level offered at SM East — Spanish 6.
Rysko teaches the only Spanish 6 class that has just nine students, including senior Norah Anderson.
“We do a lot of class discussions,” Anderson said. “[Rysko is] really open to our point of view on things.”
Rysko often gives her students real-world news articles from Spanish-speaking countries and a “hot-seat” activity where a student faces away from the board with a set of English words written on it. At the same time, their peers explain what's on the board in Spanish, according to senior Katherine Piraquive.
“We started off with Gen-Z slang, so like rizz was one of [the words to guess],” Piraquive said. “But [Rysko] makes it really like [a] sort of family environment.”
Rysko continues to create engaging classroom activities and is still learning new terms to expand her own Spanish abilities.
With the help of Betancur, who is now taking English classes at Johnson County Community College, Rysko is continuing to learn new terms.
“Every day I’m learning new words,” Rysko said. “It’s been full circle [because] first she was my Spanish teacher and now I’m kind of her English teacher.”
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