Jorgeanne Barley can relate to both the challenges and the enjoyment students in her Spanish language classes at Wiscasset Middle School and Wiscasset High School experience in learning a new language. She has learned two, English and Spanish.

Barley, 46, grew up speaking Portuguese in her native Brazil. She started to learn English while still a child, but hadn’t become fluent in it by the time she met her husband, Byron Barley.

He was an exchange student from the University of Maine at Orono. She moved to Maine with him in 1998, after that year’s prolific ice storm.

“I almost went back,” she joked after school on Sept. 5, in her upstairs classroom at Wiscasset Middle School. She splits each school day between the two schools.

It’s Barley’s first year teaching in Wiscasset, more than two decades into a teaching career that started with teaching physical education in Brazil.

In Maine, she taught Portuguese at the University of Maine at Orono and Southern Maine Community College, then Spanish at Kennebec Valley Community College.

Her husband is a language consultant for Central Maine Power and Iberdrola in Augusta, and teaches Spanish at KVCC; and Barley, in her college jobs, also met people who spoke Spanish, so she took it up.

“I just fell in love with the language,” she said.

When Barley had her son, she knew it was time to stop thinking she would learn English when she got around to it. 

“I realized I really needed to learn the language.”

Now, she’s working on getting her U.S. citizenship.

“I want to vote,” she said.

Barley incorporates the cultures of Spanish-speaking countries into her middle and high school students’ learning of the language.

“I use the cultural piece all the time, the food and music. Then they get engaged,” she said.

Barley said she is enjoying teaching in Wiscasset.

“I love it. It’s a small community (with) small schools. It’s a good fit.”

Barley, her husband, and their son David, 12, live in Augusta.