User:Kchallis

Brief bio
My names is Katherine Elizabeth Vasicek Challis. But you can call me Kate.

I was born in Lubbock, Texas. I am a second generation Texas Czech. My ancestors immigrated from Vratimov, Frenštát, and Trojanovice to Texas in ~1873 and ~1880. Maybe someday we will know their story better; right now a lot of that information is lost to time.

I grew up in Naperville, Illinois and Westfield, Massachusetts. I went to school at Williston Northampton and graduated in '04.

I studied in Rennes, France for nine months with a program called School Year Abroad when I was a junior in High School, where I lived in a home stay situation and learned French.

My grandfather was the last fluent Czech speaker in my family. If it had been an option for me to learn the Czech language at Brigham Young University, I would have. But it was not. So I settled for Arabic, which is far easier! I lived for a total of six months in Al-Husn and Irbid, Jordan. I taught Arabic to middle school students at a K-8 charter school in Lehi, Utah with "world languages" for the magnet. I graduated from BYU in 2009 with a BA in French Teaching and minor in TESOL K-12.

My last semester I got married. I left my career to stay home with my children.

I am only a maximum of 1/4 Czech by DNA, but probably because of my maiden name, and also because I'm really weird, I am completely in love with the Czech language and obsessed with learning it. In 2013 I started blogging about my ancestors at Czech Out Your Ancestors. In 2017 I started a death sprint to learn the Czech language, and blogging about it on můj oceán slov. I probably speak Czech somewhere between an A2 and B1 level, maybe slightly higher, depending on the topic; language fluency is hardly linear. In two separate unofficial oral proficiency interviews on the ACTFL scale, I scored an advanced-high in French and an advanced-mid in Arabic.

I am a devout latter-day saint.

I live in Ankeny, Iowa with my adoring husband and five children.

Please be nice to me. I am human.

My Goals for contributing to Wikipedia
My primary goals for contributing to Wikipedia are to improve the horrible dearth of knowledge on English Wikipedia about all Czech related subjects. Far too often information about Czech history is abbreviated from its original Czech. That is not tolerable. Thus I am overcoming my intense denial that I have anything worthy to contribute at all to this weird online encyclopedia, and just going for contributing my two mites.

VERY RELUCTANT
O thou Wikipedia!

Thou mammoth slug-like media!

Thine trivia replete-ia

and most of it by men.

When e're I get an i-dea

I'm taken to your site-ea.

How oft hath I relied-ia

upon thee as a friend?

That's why I feel betrayed-ia

to see how thou art made-ia!

Thine biases afraid-ia,

thine wisdom but pretend!

I have begun to doubt-ia

for if they lack in clout-ia

good edits are thrown out-ia

by nitpicky children!

Your learning curve frustrates-ia.

The markup style I hate-ia.

And on my nerves it grates-ia

the mess of thine back-end.

All talk pages I've viewed-ia

just poorly threaded feuds-ia

hubristically rude-ia

on trifles to contend.

My cynicism grows-ia

and in my thirst to know-ia

my confidence erodes-ia

in thine infor-mation.

O icky Wikipedia!

Thou prideful, male-made media!

The only way I'm freed-ia

is in contri-bution.