• Welcome!  Thanks for visiting my page.  My name is Anthony Percival, and I'm super excited to be back at Athey Creek. This is my 19th year teaching, I can't believe how time flies.  I started working at Athey Creek in 2006 and now I'm back here after teaching the last two years at Meridian Creek.

    I have lived most of my life in Portland, but being a navy brat, I was born in Mississippi while my dad was stationed there and so I didn't permanently live in Portland until my dad retired and returned to his home town. (My dad graduated from Reynolds high school, my mother from Marshall high school, and my grandmother still lives in the house they built in Gresham in the early 1960's - when so much of Gresham was nothing but farmland.).  We settled in North Portland, and I graduated from Jefferson high school in 1993.  

    For college I attended the University of Oregon (GO DUCKS!).  I majored in Spanish and Geography as well as participated in many musical endeavors, including 4 years of Marching band - marching at half time in both the Rose Bowl and the Cotton Bowl - and 2 years in the basketball band - traveling with the woman's team to Athens, GA as they participated in the NCAA tournament.

    My senior year in college I had the opportunity to live and study in Seville, Spain.  What a great experience to finish my studies in such a great country!  I studied Spanish History, Art, Literature, and Language Studies.  It was an amazing adventure and I hold Spain and its people close to my heart and have had the luck to visit there 4 more times since then.  In the last 10 years I have made a connection in Chile, where I have some great friends, and I try to travel there at least once every two years.

    Upon returning to Portland after college, I didn't know exactly what I wanted to do.  I was looking at three options - meteorology, urban development, and education.  However, I decided that I wanted to start working instead of going straight to grad school so I spent 2 years working in an elementary school with students learning English.  I did everything from teaching small classroom groups, translating and interpreting, working with the community, and helping teachers design their lessons to help their students become better at English.  Those 2 years showed me that I was destined to be a teacher and so I back to school and got my master's degree in Education at Concordia University in north Portland.

    After finishing school, I worked as a substitute teacher for 6 months, and then got a long-term high school Spanish substitute position at Newberg high school.  That was great - so much fun.  From there, I got hired at one of the middle schools in Newberg, where I taught Spanish and Social Studies to English Language Learners.  After five years I decided to come a little closer to my home town and got a job at Athey Creek, teaching Spanish and then transitioning into Spanish and Social Studies.  

    In my free time, I'm a semi-professional musician.  I play the woodwinds (flutes/saxophones/clarinets) in the orchestral pit for musicals around the city.  I've worked at many different theater companies in the area and have played some great shows, like Les Miserables, Grease, Spamalot, The Producers, Avenue Q, Dreamgirls, and Sweet Charity.  For exercise, I love to play tennis and I swim every morning before school.  I am married to my husband Joe, and we have two tuxedo cats, one that acts like a dog (like he literally plays fetch) and one that acts like a cat (like she will ignore us constantly).  Thanks for reading and getting to know a little bit about me and my life!  Hasta luego!