GARDENA : Immigrant Nominated for Teaching Honor

At first, Ana Infante says, teachers thought she wasn’t very smart.

The Cuban-born immigrant spoke only Spanish, so she sat silently in her fifth-grade class, never answering questions. It was not until she was the first to finish a long-division exam that her teachers began to notice her intelligence.

“They made you feel like because you don’t speak English, you don’t know anything,” Infante said. “That’s one of the reasons why I decided to become a bilingual teacher.”

Now, almost 30 years later, Infante is a third-grade teacher at 186th Street School and one of three instructors in California nominated for bilingual teacher of the year.

Infante and other nominees were recognized recently by the California Assn. of Bilingual Education.

The 41-year-old mother of three says teaching young students in their native language and gradually incorporating English lessons is the best way to learn English and other subjects at the same time.

“If we don’t put children on hold while they learn English, they’ll learn faster and better,” she said.

A 16-year veteran of bilingual education, Infante uses the performing arts to help her 8- and 9-year-old students learn the basics. Last year they performed “The Nutcracker.” This year it will be “Peter Pan.”

“It’s more motivating than diagraming verbs, and it’s more fun,” she said.

Infante has lived in the South Bay most of her life. After she and her family fled the Fidel Castro regime in the early 1960s, they lived for several years in Puerto Rico and Argentina before settling in Carson. A product of the Los Angeles Unified School District, she graduated from Carson High School as the class valedictorian and went on to get her bachelor’s and master’s degrees from Cal State Dominguez Hills.