Signora McHale - Colonie’s Honorary Italian

By Owen Smith

June 1, 2021

During last year’s Italian II class, students walked into the room and were greeted by the usual “Ciao!” Then Mrs. McHale asked a few students to go down to the office and pick up a pizza and garlic knots for the class. That is how the food unit began.

Mrs. McHale or Signora McHale keeps her classes as enjoyable and interactive as possible.

Along with the sudden pizza party, McHale loves to have food days in class no matter the occasion. In both Italian I and II, she assigns projects where students make and bring in an Italian food or dish for the class to taste. This unique project brings the class together for a relaxed and fun day of trying new foods or just talking and eating food.

McHale also rewards students any time she can. Whether it is a well-done homework assignment, the winner of a review game, or even just for participating and behaving, McHale loves to give out prizes and gifts to her students. These can include candy, bonus points, or in the peculiar event of a pandemic, she has mailed gift cards to her students even when she can’t see them.

She has said in the past that although she is not Italian, she still feels the need to feed her students as if she was an Italian mother.

While she teaches Italian I and II at Colonie Central High School, she teaches Spanish as well.

Spanish is the field that she began to study even before she discovered the Italian language.

As an undergraduate at Wells College, she took some Italian classes. This is where McHale first found her love for the Italian language and culture. Her professor at Wells was her key inspiration to delve deeper into Italian and to find her true passion for the language.

“I started a new language, Italian, and I just fell in love with it and I fell in love with his class,” she said.

Even though she fell in love with the language while at Wells College, she still did not know what career she wanted to pursue.

At this time McHale thought she would follow along a political science route or something similar. But after receiving her undergraduate degree, she decided to take some education classes at Syracuse University and at some other smaller local schools too. This is what led to her getting her teaching degree.

Looking back on her career, when she started college she had zero knowledge of the Italian language. Now, she is Colonie’s only Italian teacher.

The influence that Italian has on her does not stop when she leaves school.

Outside of school, she helps her husband learn the language, who studies Italian “at least two hours a day and even more on the weekend”, she says.

He gets to learn firsthand from a high school Italian teacher and takes courses online. After introducing him to the language and culture, he is very self-motivated to learn more and has also fallen in love with it.

In addition to learning the language at home, McHale travels to Italy with her husband most summers. As an Italian teacher, part of understanding the culture is immersing yourself within it. This is exactly what she has done over the years and they have also begun to have regular plans while staying there.

She says, “We know people now in Italy, we have friends that we go there with and they have family. And we get to stay there right in their house. And it’s awesome.”

Becoming a teacher is a pretty common dream career path for many kids and adults. But you never really hear any say they want to grow up and study to teach Italian.

But when asked if she has any regrets about her choice to teach this language, McHale replied with a “No” immediately.

She says, that if anything, it has only gotten better over the years. Her trips to Italy have gotten more regular as she has contacts in the country.

There are many lessons that you can learn from McHale but most importantly you must remain open-minded. She didn’t know that she wanted to study Italian and pursue a career as a teacher until college. And this is something that we can take from her experiences.

As a teacher, she says that she feels for the current seniors trying to learn in the midst of a pandemic. And she also wishes them good luck or buona fortuna in the future.