Teaching: Instilling Love of a Subject through Enthusiasm
I come from a long line of educators. My mother is a school teacher, and so was her mother. For years I said I wouldn't be a schoolteacher, because grading all those papers looked so unpleasant. But from the first time I
taught as an undergraduate at UC Santa Cruz, I knew I was sunk - I was an educator just like my mother and grandmother, even if I teach a very different age group and a very different subject.
During my time at UCSC, I took advantage of every teaching opportunity that came my way, including TA'ing for Introduction to Feminism and eventually designing and co-facilitating my own course with a fellow undergraduate. After college I taught abroad, in Germany and Ecuador, as well as at home in the United States. I have taught all grades, from kindergarten to university levels, and I have taught a wide variety of subjects, from German language to beginning algebra to elementary school reading intervention.
The mentorship that I've experienced during my time at Stanford, both formally and informally, has been invaluable in allowing me to branch out and try new things as an instructor, and to really determine what being an educator and teacher means to me. For me, education is not only about making sure my students understand the difference between the accusative and dative cases (crucial though that difference is!). It's about instilling a love of something in them through my own enthusiasm for the subject, and thereby making them want to push themselves further and learn more.
Here are a few of my most significant teaching and course design accomplishments.
- Co-teaching "Empathy in Science, Society, and Stories" for the Stanford University Hope House Scholars Program, for women struggling with drug and alcohol addiction. (In progress)
- Serves as a Graduate Teaching Consultant for the Center for Teaching and Learning. (2013-present)
- Designed online literature courses for Shmoop University. (2013)
- Taught First and second year German language at Stanford. (2011-2014)
- Co-taught “War and Warfare in Germany” with Professor Russell Berman as part of the Graduate Student and Faculty Collaboration, funded by the Teagle Foundation. (Spring 2013)
- Participated in a Fortbildungskurs for non-native teachers of German at the University of Heidelberg. (Summer 2014)
- Professor Elizabeth Bernhardt’s course on “Teaching Second Language Literatures." (Fall 2012)
- Taught English abroad in Ecuador and Germany (as a Fulbright teaching assistant), as well as at private language schools in the San Francisco Bay Area. (2005-2010)
- Taught students K-8 in a variety of subjects, including writing, reading, and math, and ran a reading intervention program (SpellRead) for Kaplan Tutoring. (2008-2010)
- Designed and co-taught a student directed seminar at UC Santa Cruz on 20th Century Children’s Fantasy Literature with another undergraduate student. (2005)