TEACHING STATEMENT

For me, teaching is not so much about imparting knowledge as it is about providing students with the tools they can use to gather — and apply — knowledge themselves. My role is to facilitate their learning experience by designing classes that provide the opportunity to read texts they have not been exposed to or shed new light on ones they have; and to create assignments that allow them to develop a literacy that goes beyond simply reading words. To this end, I bring to the syllabi texts which stimulate different senses and require an expanded repertoire of critical analysis — including film, music, two- and three-dimensional visual media, and even food. One of the unique elements I bring to class are games I have designed in order to help students learn through play.

My curricula blend a traditional approach to grammar and rhetoric — the mechanics of English — with innovative reading units developed for traditional and non-traditional texts. One of the units I teach in high school is typography, so that students have a better understanding of the graphemes that form the basis of the text we read and how they influence how we read it. 

As a practicing writer publishing across genres and platforms (in journals, newsprint, and online), I am also able to offer my students practical advice about getting their work read by a wider audience.

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Classes taught at Hillel Academy of Pittsburgh:

Seventh Grade Language Arts
High School Language Arts and Rhetoric
AP Language & Composition
AP Literature & Composition
​Senior Seminar in Literature

Classes taught at the University of Pittsburgh:

Reading Poetry
Short Story in Context
Words and Images
Introduction to Literature
Introduction to Poetry Writing
Introduction to Creative Writing
General Writing

Scavenger Hunt

Each year I design a problem solving challenge that leads my seventh grade students to the topic of their culminating research paper. I choose the topic for them, based on the clues they've given me all year about their interests. The class must work as a team in order to crack codes, find hidden messages, perform tasks across academic disciplines, and locate specific answers online that lead them to their next clues. In 2020, with students having spent the latter half of their year in lockdown, they went on a journey around the world in order to find their topic. A variety of unique paper tools was delivered in an envelope to each student's mailbox in the pre-dawn hours for them to find as part of the first clue. Each step of the journey produced a different "winner" from the class who was given the next clue (written in rhyming couplets) to deliver to their peers. The point of the exercise? To demonstrate that scholarship rarely happens in isolation, builds of research that has been developed by others, often requires the collaboration of peers who have different skillsets, and sometimes leads you to places you never expect along the way. It develops a student's independence and calls upon them to recall certain essential lessons we've learned that year. It's also a LOT of fun!