Essentially I am a licensed ELA teacher with over 30 years of experience teaching English and English literature.
What I bring to teaching, however does not come from academia as much as it comes from diversity of experience working as a journalist, a community organizer and film maker. I can say that I have published a literary study guide to a Caribbean novel and also say that I have won awards for a short motivational film and that I am currently working on a hour-long documentary about women from the English-speaking Caribbean who come to the US to work as nannies and housekeepers and leave their own children behind.
I would like to think also that when I speak to my students about pre-columbian civilizations and wonder at the mathematical sameness of pyramids in Europe, Asia and the Americas, I can speak from personal experience and a sense of cultural connectedness.
But more than anything else what I bring to my teaching is the grit of working with school dropouts in the Caribbean and minority kids in an urban public school in NYC. The challenge of stimulating the minds of my students makes teaching challenging and fun. For instance, though I am ignorant in math, I can't forget the time when I accompanied a contractor friend of mine to see a woman who wanted to renovate her house. Specifically, she wanted to raise the pitch of her roof. While the contractor was working out the length of the rafter the long way I was able to beat him to it, using Pythagoras' theorem.
This is what real learning should be about - making connections - unfortunately it is not always so and very often we need a tutor.
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