Cailey Oehler began teaching at Lick-Wilmerding High School in 2021, and currently teaches Spanish 2 Accelerated and Spanish 4.
She loves the classes she teaches, and said that she gets to interact with students from all corners of the LWHS community. She teaches “mostly sophomores and seniors with the occasional junior. And quite a few freshmen. I really get a broad range.” She said, “My students are awesome. That’s what I’ll always remember. I really love the way that people are always seeking new ways to get involved on campus . I feel like the faculty do that too, which is really great.”
Photo by Odin Marin
Before coming to LWHS, Oehler worked at the Julia Morgan School for Girls in Oakland where she taught sixth, seventh and eighth grade Spanish. “I was their entire language department,” she said.
Oehler’s main area of interest outside of teaching is travel, and she often finds ways to combine those two passions. She said, “I lead trips every summer and also during breaks from school. I was just in Puerto Rico this past week with a group of high schoolers.”
She leads a whole host of trips for students with a variety of purposes. The trip she was just doing was about leadership development. “There was a service element and lots of inquiry into our own character and values. Some of the trips I lead are for language learning, but most of them are just community focused and have a homestay element in them,” Oehler explained.
In addition to her recent Puerto Rico trip, she has led programs abroad in Costa Rica, Mexico, Peru, Argentina and Panama. She said, “the work that I do is with a few different organizations, but I love to just travel independently.”
She discovered her passion for travel through a study abroad program in college. She said, “I studied at a public university in Salamanca. I got to meet a lot of students from all over Europe. And I did a homestay, which was also really great.”
She loved her time traveling in Spain so much that she immediately decided to do a fellowship in Chile. She said, “I lived in a village and there weren’t really any other foreigners there. So I got to learn not only a very different Spanish from the one in Spain but also a different culture.”
While many of her most formative travel experiences happened in academic contexts, she also “loves solo travel.” She said, “One summer I was really lucky because I got to see a few wonders of the world in a row: first Machu Picchu, then the Panama Canal and then Iguazú Falls.”
Oehler plans to continue traveling after she leaves LWHS. She said, I might settle in Bogotá, and I’m thinking I will probably go back to teaching English as a second language.
