I'm currently the Director of the Learning Center at Stratton Mountain School, working 1:1 or in small groups with elite student athletes. Some of my students have learning exceptionalities, others need support managing academics while travelling to training and competitions around the world, chasing snow. It's a privilege to support these kinesthetic wizards and witness their dedication, endurance, and somatic brilliance. Teenagers are among my favorite collaborators. They're wise and open - riding that edge of freedom, risk and trust. I am so inspired by my students.
Some history: My dad was a lifelong public high school principal, the best kind. I never thought I would wind up being a teacher; I truly backed into it. I was a young mom, raising my daughter in a world full of books and stories from the very start. Like I did, she loved school; I gave her the same Montessori beginning in a Children's House then found a strong public elementary school like I had. Suspicious of my bright daughter's super-chipper first grade teacher, I volunteered in her classroom. I discovered immediately that she was an excellent teacher - devoted, joyful, and actually dead serious about her responsibility. One day while we prepped a reading lesson, she offhandedly said that I should be a teacher. I was stunned. I was working as a union organizer at the time (while continuing to write poems and dance). She said simply, "You can do it, and we need you." I took it to heart.
I've been working in all kinds of classrooms since 1996, first trained through the AmeriCorps Literacy Project in southern California. I learned how to teach reading to kindergartners whose families had migrated to California from lands to the south. In 2002 I completed a BA in Urban Policy from Occidental College's Urban and Environmental Policy Institute, where I was threatened with a lawsuit right before my partner and I received a Pass with Distinction for our research and final thesis project about the hardships faced by the unionized workers on campus. Next came an MA in English at Northern Arizona University, where I circled back to Flagstaff to live again amongst ponderosas, write and study poetry with the late Jim Simmerman.
In recent years, I've taught English literature and composition and offered academic coaching at area schools in Vermont and Massachusetts - the Greenwood School, Landmark College, Stoneleigh-Burnham School and Northfield Mount Hermon (my alma mater).
My executive functioning coaching work includes adults outside of academic settings, too. My approach is individualized and flexible, in person and/or remote - and sometimes extends to household/office organizing.
Some history: My dad was a lifelong public high school principal, the best kind. I never thought I would wind up being a teacher; I truly backed into it. I was a young mom, raising my daughter in a world full of books and stories from the very start. Like I did, she loved school; I gave her the same Montessori beginning in a Children's House then found a strong public elementary school like I had. Suspicious of my bright daughter's super-chipper first grade teacher, I volunteered in her classroom. I discovered immediately that she was an excellent teacher - devoted, joyful, and actually dead serious about her responsibility. One day while we prepped a reading lesson, she offhandedly said that I should be a teacher. I was stunned. I was working as a union organizer at the time (while continuing to write poems and dance). She said simply, "You can do it, and we need you." I took it to heart.
I've been working in all kinds of classrooms since 1996, first trained through the AmeriCorps Literacy Project in southern California. I learned how to teach reading to kindergartners whose families had migrated to California from lands to the south. In 2002 I completed a BA in Urban Policy from Occidental College's Urban and Environmental Policy Institute, where I was threatened with a lawsuit right before my partner and I received a Pass with Distinction for our research and final thesis project about the hardships faced by the unionized workers on campus. Next came an MA in English at Northern Arizona University, where I circled back to Flagstaff to live again amongst ponderosas, write and study poetry with the late Jim Simmerman.
In recent years, I've taught English literature and composition and offered academic coaching at area schools in Vermont and Massachusetts - the Greenwood School, Landmark College, Stoneleigh-Burnham School and Northfield Mount Hermon (my alma mater).
My executive functioning coaching work includes adults outside of academic settings, too. My approach is individualized and flexible, in person and/or remote - and sometimes extends to household/office organizing.