After nearly two decades in the classroom, Laura Calo still speaks about teaching with the same enthusiasm she had as a child pretending to run her own classroom in Italy. Her journey from playing make believe in a small Pugliese town to leading classes in Italian and Spanish in a Chicago suburb has been shaped by the forces of immigration and culture, and a lifelong passion for education.
Calo was born in Chicago, but when she was only a year and a half old, her family moved back to their hometown of Mola di Bari. She spent the next nine years there before returning to the United States. “Both of my parents are from Mola di Bari,” Calo explains. “
