Dane Leone

Leone started teaching five years ago, all five of which he has spent teaching Spanish at Altoona. He attended Penn State University in State College, Pa.

Leone’s ancestry started his passion for languages. His Cuban side of the family sparked his interest in Spanish.

“There’s a story my family likes to tell. My aunt speaks Spanish. When I was three years old, I was looking at her all strange when she was speaking Spanish. I climbed up on her lap, put my fingers in her mouth and opened up her mouth… [asking] where are these [words] coming from? I didn’t really start to become really passionate about [Spanish] until college, I would say, but the interest for both the language and the culture was definitely there since elementary school,” Leone said.

In his first year of college, Leone started working with the orientation program at Penn State. The program inspired him to take a teaching career path.

“Part of working with the orientation program entailed having seniors from high school come visit the University, and then showing them around, teaching them about Penn State… I really, really kind of fell in love with working with high school age students. And then, reflecting back on how much some of my high school teachers impacted me both academically and socially, I was hoping that I could help out a lot of students, kind of like my high school teachers ended up doing,” Leone said.

Through his studies at Penn State, Leone also had the opportunity to study abroad. In his junior year of college, he lived in Santiago, Chile for five months.

“Because I wanted the Spanish practice, I did live with the host family,” Leone said. “That helped a ton because you would have dinner with people who only spoke Spanish, no English, as compared to being in a dorm with a bunch of English-speaking people who might force you to speak a little more English than you wanted to.”

After Leone graduated, he was searching for a large public school that was halfway between his home and his college. He found what he was looking for in Altoona.

Leone enjoys the time he spends in school interacting with students the most.

“I’ll be the first to tell you I absolutely hate going home and lesson planning and grading and all that stuff, but I’ve never had seven and a half hours go quicker than a school day because you’re always moving around. You’re always helping someone. You know us language teachers, we don’t like [sitting] behind our desk and just kind of teaching from there. We’re always up and moving and helping, acting things out and drawing on the board and all that fun stuff. So although it is a little cliche, it’s really true. It’s the time between eight o’clock and 2:40 that I enjoy the most,” Leone said.

One obstacle Leone faces is that a lot of his students don’t see a need for them to use Spanish in the future. Leone wishes that more people would see the value of learning another language.

“I have a brother in law. He speaks Spanish very well, and he was at a gas station out towards Philadelphia one day and this Hispanic mom and her daughter, their phone was dead. They didn’t have money to buy a charger or anything, and they were lost and confused. He was able to help them get back to Washington, D.C. from Philadelphia and that would not have been possible without the use of Spanish. It’s things like that you never know when you’re going to have to use. It might not be daily but having another language and some tools to speak and to listen to in your back pocket is going to eventually become beneficial,” Leone said.