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By FOSS FARRAR
Traveler Staff Writer
reporter@arkcity.net

England native Heather Radford in her first year as a language arts teacher at Arkansas City Middle School got a lot of puzzled looks from students last August during the first week of the school year.

"We use some different words in England; 'brackets' instead of 'parentheses' and 'full stop' instead of period," Radford said recently. "When I told the kids to put a 'full stop' at the end of a sentence, they said, 'huh?'"

Radford had to overcome a slight language barrier, but it didn't take her long. Likewise, it didn't take her students long to understand her when she spoke rapidly in her British brogue.

"I told them at first, 'If I talk too fast, let me know,'" she said. "But now I go blah-blah-blah-blah-blah and they understand, but the rest of the school doesn't."

In fact, Radford and her students have little trouble understanding each other these days. After she conducted a reading session with five students, they all agreed they're learning a lot in the class.

Radford added that she's learned a lot from her students, too. For instance, new words: They taught her that a "car park" in England is called a "parking lot" in this country.

"We're teaching her and she's teaching us," said sixth-grade student Brandee Furr.

Though she's now comfortable sharing stories of her native country and talking about cultural differences between England and the United States, that wasn't the case at the beginning of last semester.

"I tried at first not to bring my country into the classroom," she said. "But I soon found out that they wanted me to tell about my country."

Radford now uses the cultural differences between the two countries as teaching points. Last November, for instance some of her students expressed surprise that she had never celebrated Thanksgiving in England.

"'Why do you celebrate Thanksgiving?,' I asked them and they told me about the Pilgrims coming to this country and having a meal with the Indians," she said. "'Well, if Pilgrims came here to flee from persecution in England, then do you think the English would celebrate that?"

It was during her first Thanksgiving in America, two years ago, that Radford applied for an opening in language arts in the Arkansas City School District, she said. She had taught school in her native country for eight years.

"I had found out about (the job opening) on the Internet, so I put in a letter of application," Radford said. "While I was here on vacation, they invited me for an interview the day before Thanksgiving."

When she was offered the position, she was thrilled to accept.

Radford had fallen in love with Kansas after a visit to Newton three years ago with the school board for which she worked in England. They had come to Kansas to research teaching methods used here compared to their home country.

"When I got back to England, I couldn't stop talking about Newton and Kansas," she said. "It's nice to see that an education isn't that different in England than it is here."

Radford and her husband, John, returned to the United States during the summer of 2002 and toured various Kansas towns including Salina, Hutchinson, Topeka and Kansas City. She also visited colleagues in Newton who encouraged her to take steps to become a certified teacher in Kansas.

She did so, working toward her teacher's license from afar. She took an exam at Wichita State University and received certification to teach language arts at the secondary level in 2003.

Radford is a native of a village in Worcestershire in Southern England. About six miles north of the village is a factory where the the famous steak sauce named after the county name is made. And she has made numerous visits to Stratford, Shakespeare's hometown, which is only 20 miles northwest of the village.

Radford said she believes kids are better behaved in Arkansas City than in her native England.

"They are respectful, polite and they listen, and they like to ask questions," she said.

ABOVE: Heather Radford interacts with her sixth-grade students during a reading exercise at Ark City Middle School.