I love teaching. As a young girl, I spent an entire summer making up lessons, assigning myself homework, and doing it! Another summer resulted in my having read 44 Nancy Drew mysteries. I have been working with children of all ages steadily since 1997, when my younger son Peter was two. He came with me to the alternative school I taught at in Jamaica, where my littlest students learned one to one correspondence on a trampoline outdoors. Later, both my sons came with me to the local private school where we spent many years before returning to the USA in August, 2010.
I have been a volunteer art & craft teacher, K-6 classroom substitute teacher, creative movement and dance teacher, remedial and enrichment teacher for 2-6th graders. I have also taught middle school English, literature, language arts and French. For several years I was responsible for assessing all new students to our school, and all end-of-year assessments. I helped create many IEPs, and attended countless team meetings. I managed the library and taught library skills classes at the K-8 levels. I taught high school literature and helped my older son's friends with their college application essays. I am doing this now with my younger son's friends.
I currently volunteer at the library in the Hardy School in Arlington, having also served there as a math tutor. I devour books and do all kinds of puzzles, especially Sudoku, crossword and logic puzzles. I love to dance and to sing, and to take walks in all kinds of weather. I tutor three 10 year old fifth graders with reading, comprehension, speed and fluency, math, oral expression and writing. I'm also working with a 44 year old Haitian woman in English.
I love to see smiles on the faces of the students I work with; to see them delight in their own progress, and to see the fear and dread of schoolwork, especially math, reading and writing, leave their eyes. There are many ways to learn, and different styles of learning. My mission is to discover what works best for each child. Do we use rhythm to learn those times tables? Or will pictures work better? Rote repetition? Writing them over and again? Is she happier standing up to read, pacing, sitting side by side? Would he rather read the instructions silently, or hear them? Both? All? It's my job to figure it out. This is what I do. This is what I do well.
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