All smiles in Retiro Park Hi! My name is Ellen Butler. I am originally from Nashville, Tennessee, famously known as Music City USA. I attended the University of Tennessee in Knoxville, where I received my Bachelor's of Arts in Political Science and Spanish Language. After graduation I had a few options, but none as intriguing as the Auxiliares de Conversacion program--I have dreamed of living abroad since I was little so I figured, why not? Why not? Two little words, a silly little phrase that has been said countless times to justify indulgences or counter arguments. For me, however, these two little words have a different significance. I am really good at hesitation; I feel the impulse to ask myself why I make the choices I make, and I often get so caught up in this self-interrogation that I forget the task at hand. Instead I began to think, why not do this? What do I really have to lose? This shift in mindset has helped me navigate through all the ups and downs of movi...
A few years ago, my family and I started a new Christmas tradition of splitting up into two teams and competing in an escape room in my hometown of Nashville. You may already be familiar, but for the uninitiated, escape rooms, also known as breakout rooms, are like a real-life version of a video game. The themes vary, but the rules generally remain the same: you have a fixed amount of time to break out, you have a limited amount of external assistance from the game producers, and you will have many tasks and puzzles to complete successfully in order to move forward in the game. When the teachers and assistants at IES Cubas de la Sagra were brainstorming possible Halloween activities, I started to wonder if it would be possible to create an escape room-like game that could be adjusted to fit both the physical restrictions of the space we have and the wide range of students' abilities. Together with my fellow assistants, Matt and Yasmin, we came up with a version created aro...