Waterford High School has a new Spanish teacher this 2024-2025 school year. Mrs. Cronin is a yoga-loving, Colombian-native Spanish teacher. She has been teaching for 14 years and currently teaches Spanish 1 Advanced, 2 Honors, and 3 Advanced in room 209.
Mrs. Cronin came to the United States about 17 years ago. She came over through an Au-Pair program, which allows people from other countries to come to the United States and study through our education system, while acting as a nanny for a participating family.
She received her bachelor’s degree in journalism from the Universidad de Pamplona (University of Pamplona), her Master’s in education and technology from University of Saint Joseph, and her Sixth Year with an Administration degree from Southern State University.
Cronin loves to learn, so after college, she decided that she wanted to learn English, which is the leading reason for coming to America. She never had good language teachers growing up, so she hated learning English.
“It was really hard, and my journey in language also inspired me to be a teacher. I know what it feels like not to get it, what it feels like to feel frustrated with a language.”
After first coming to America, Mrs. Cronin had many jobs before going to teach, including babysitting, working at a bakery, brewing coffee, and was also a server. Previously, she worked at Mohegan Sun, all while she was learning English. After three years, she randomly lost her job because there were too many people working there and she was completely in shambles, but one day, she woke up and said, “I’m gonna find a job and this time, it’s going to be a job that I love.”
Before she started to work at high schools, her husband convinced her to work at a daycare as a bilingual teacher.
After working with the little kids, she realized that she loves teaching. “I would teach the teachers Spanish so that they could teach the kids Spanish and I loved it. It made me so happy. For the first time in my life, I worked forward to going to work,” she says. She felt so thankful to have a job that made her so happy.
Her and her boss had an agreement that after 3 months of her working there, she had to be let go because she didn’t have any documentation or certification for working as a teacher.
After 3 months of working at the daycare, she had a meeting with her boss and her boss didn’t wanna let go of her. She asked if she was willing to go to school to become a teacher, so that she could get her certification. Cronin, without any hesitation, said yes. She took an alternative course to become a teacher called ARC, Alternative Route to Certification. In order to earn her certification, she had to prove that she was able to teach Spanish to kids and she passed with flying colors. “It was easy since Spanish is my native language,” she said.
She has been teaching for 14 years. She worked as a substitute in kindergarten, elementary, and middle schools while she was going through schooling. After finishing with her schooling, she worked at the Marine Science Magnet High School in Groton for eight years, East Lyme High School last year, and here at Waterford High for her tenth year of teaching, in her words, “the big kids.”
Cronin says that it is an honor to teach and that she loves sharing: “What’s the point of knowing all this stuff if you can’t share it with others?”
She loves learning as well. Cronin has been studying American history in her free time to understand America’s foundation and how it came to be the nation it is today. Also in her free time, she enjoys doing and teaching yoga, which she has been teaching for five years.
She went to yoga and hated it on the first day. Cronin had never planned on coming back, but due to her lack of knowledge of the English language, she had accidentally paid for a 10-class pass. The owners saw that she loved it and that she could not afford it, so they offered her the ACVA, which is a program that allowed her to clean the yoga studio for two hours a week for free yoga.
The few weeks that she has been teaching at Waterford High School has bee nothing but amazing for her. She says, “I love it. I love how kind and respectful the kids are. It’s the people that make this place what it is.”
Many of her colleagues have had great things to say about Mrs. Cronin.
Mrs. Batty says, “It was clear that she is dedicated to her students in every capacity and her enthusiasm for all things Lancer Nation was contagious.”
Fellow world language teachers, Mr. Wheeler, Ms. Marchese, and Ms. Shea, described her as a bubbly and enthusiastic person.
Whether she is teaching conjugation or a brand new lesson, she has a very set way that she teaches her classes. In typical language classes, you’re either reading, listening, or talking in that lesson and Mrs. Cronin practices all of that in her classes.
If you’re interested in meeting her, stop by room 209 and say hi!
