Ms. Andrea Madrigal Morales is a first-year English and World Language teacher at Channel Islands. She is teaching the Oxnard Union High School District’s first-ever Tagalog class.

Morales taught for over 10 years at high schools in the Philippines. She has been teaching since 2001. She moved to Camarillo in 2012 and spent four years teaching at the elementary school Mary Law Private School.

She has two Tagalog classes here at CI, during periods three and four. The Tagalog class studies the Filipino language. One of the goals of this class is to help the Filipino students who are born and raised in the United States to learn the language, understand it, and appreciate it.

“The Tagalog class is diverse,” Morales said, “because there are not only Filipino students learning it, but also other students from different ethnic backgrounds who wanted to speak, read, and write in the language.

“I speak the language Tagalog fluently,” Ms. Morales addded, “but it is very challenging to teach it because my students are of different levels of knowledge in Tagalog.”

Many of her Hispanic students feel comfortable in her class because some terms and words sound similar to Spanish.

Ms. Morales graduated from a public school. Her father died when she 12, so her mother did all she could to raise Morales and her four siblings. She finished college with a degree in secondary education with a major in English and minor in Filipino at the Divine Word College of Calapan in Calapan City, Oriental Mindoro, Philippines.

In her free time, she reads magazines, listens to music, and goes fishing with her husband.

All of her family lives in the Philippines; she is the only one that moved away from them. Morales is always making sure that she communicates with them regularly, especially now that her mother is very sick.

She is happily married to her husband who is always supporting her in everything no matter what. She believes that one should “Do unto others what you want others to do unto you,” a very famous Chinese saying by Confucius.