Tamara Temple
- Email: ttemple@pipeline.sbcc.edu
More About Tamara
She has taught for over 30 years English, Journalism, writing coach, and ESL at San
Marcos High School, UCSB, Oxnard College, Ventura Adult Education, and Santa Barbara
City College. She went to UCSB and graduated with a Bachelor's Degree in English and
a Single Subject Teaching Credential in English, along with a Master's Degree in
Education. Later, she received her Master's Degree in Multilingual Education from
Arizona State University while raising her two sons. Currently, her two sons are off
at colleges of their own, and she looks forward to family time with them whenever
possible. She has two beagle dogs that keep her busy walking when she isn't teaching.
Her favorite hobbies are hiking, gardening, cooking, reading, and swimming in the
ocean or a pool, whenever possible. Her joy for teaching ESL began as a child when
she and her single mother moved frequently due to expenses and potential new jobs
for her mother. Understanding what it felt like to always be the new person, she began
to realize how much more some members of her classrooms must feel when the culture
and language were also new. From five years old on her closest friends were from Guatemala,
Chile, Mexico, Korea, and Czechoslovakia. She enjoyed learning as much as each friend
was willing to share about their cultures, languages, food, and ideas as they were
learning of the dominant culture. She is bilingual in Spanish and knows all the naughty
words in Czechoslovakian and how to count in Korean, because that is what her friends
over the many years were willing to share with her. This joy infused itself into her
lifelong career working with multilingual and international students to this day.