Meet Our Teacher

I have always known I would be a teacher. I started teaching when I was 7 and I taught my younger sister enough for her to skip first grade, and I have continued tutoring ever since. I had my first classroom teaching experience at 17, while volunteering at an elementary school in New Zealand, where I traveled as an exchange student. I loved that experience so much that I still have many of the drawings the children made for me.

 

I have also always loved science and math, so that’s where my academic studies took me in college and graduate school. While at the latter, I ran a program known as the Physics Circus, where we taught physics concepts to elementary school children. Later, I taught at community colleges, where the highly diverse student populations taught me a lot about how to be a very adaptive and flexible teacher. 

 

My career path has also led me to work with homeschooling families, where I have been in charge of developing a customized, tailored curriculum for the whole year. I learned how to quickly pivot and change lessons based on the interests of the kids, where we could deeply experiment with what works and what doesn’t, and why that is the case. Working on enrichment activities during the summer gave me a similar experience, where I always put a special emphasis on meeting the interests of the children I was working with. I liked these experiences so much, that I knew I wanted to model my own children's learning after them.

 

I have also worked in schools and have seen how the inefficiencies and bureaucracy undermines the ability of the school to serve the children in a meaningful way. I am trying to build a school that is small, nimble, creative, and utterly devoid of the bureaucracy and politics that will dilute the meaning of what we’re achieving.

 

It is incredibly gratifying to me to see children's eyes light up with wonder when learning something new. I have seen firsthand how teachers fundamentally have the power to shift kids' experience of the world in meaningful and long-lasting ways. It's a bit of a superpower, and my absolute favorite thing about being a teacher.

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