How did you decide to move from teaching in higher education to high school?

I figured out that I wanted to teach at the high school level a few years into my graduate program, working as a teaching assistant at University of Illinois Urbana Champaign. In fact, a lovely story is Leslie Coffey ’00 and I were in the same program (she was ahead of me, we didn’t really know each other at the time). She returned to U of I and gave a talk about teaching in independent schools and I thought: yes, that’s the thing I want to do!

How is teaching high school students different from college?

They’re better! When I started I was nervous about that–I had plenty of teaching experience, but not with high school students–I was like, how do I translate what I’ve been doing? The answer was that I didn’t have to at all in terms of rigor and I found that the students were more engaged! Some of that was a result of being at a big university and teaching things like Freshman Composition, but I found that the discussion was good or better from the start. The only shifts I made were to be a better teacher, to be more engaging, and try different kinds of activities rather than sticking to any single method or discussion for too long.

Your class on Fairy Tales is very popular, how did that class come about?

I pitched that class in my job interview for Emma Willard actually! It was with Meg McClellan, and she asked me what my dream class would be. I talked about doing a course on fairy tales. I kind of interrupted myself and asked if that would be okay because of how, well, disturbing some of the content in fairy tales can be. She said that it would totally fit!

When I interviewed I was still a graduate student finishing my dissertation on fairy tales and gender in particular, to a lesser extent on fairy tales and sexuality. I was already teaching a similar class at U of I, and it seemed like the best opportunity to really teach it was at a school with younger students who primarily identity as girls or as non-binary. As long as no one minded that it might shatter their illusions of fairy tales–Disney in particular–but in a way that I think is really cool. 

This semester you’re teaching an Advanced Studies (AS) class on Modernism, is that another dream class?

It’s close to a class I pitched for my second year at Emma that didn’t happen. It was on WWI literature, and didn’t have enough students signed up for it at the time. While I wrote my dissertation on Fairy Tales, initially I thought I was going to be a Modernist! I still love that literature so much. I taught Mrs. Dalloway once at U of I, and all I wanted was to teach it again but in a course that had a broader scope. In developing AS courses we’ve talked about them being college level work, and this is absolutely a course you would take as an English major in college. 

It involves a unit on WWI, which is not considered modernism and we’re going to talk about why it doesn’t get that fancy label. It’s an idea I’ve had for a while but this course is bigger and harder in a way that I hope will be good!

How is this class harder, what makes it different from a regular class on the topic?

Modernist literature is hard on purpose so, for this course, it’s going to be very focused on the context and history. Right now the class is finishing up our first unit, pre-modernism, looking at what kind of world created the conditions for modernism. We think of Ezra Pound’s famous use of “make it new” and the idea that what writers and artists were doing wasn’t working, that it couldn’t capture what was real, or what life was surrounding the horrors of the World Wars. It’s challenging, but I think in a way that’s exciting. 

The other thing found in both AS courses in our department this year is an emphasis on research. That’s not something the English department has been focusing on in recent years, it’s been done historically but not as much during the time I’ve been here. We’ve heard from recent alums that it’s something they want to be better prepared for coming out of our department and heading to college. For me, college-level work means you no longer read a poem and just say what you think about it: you’ve got to be immersed in the scholarly discourse. So, we’re trying to fit a lot into a year-long class. The end goal is getting to an 8-10 page paper, and maybe having never read a scholarly article about a piece of literature but getting students to a point where they’re using several to bolster their own arguments. The most important skill I’m teaching is how to do a close reading, but there is value in doing that outside a vacuum and seeing how the lens you already know informs your reading. 

What are some of your favorite texts to teach?

My favorite, I think my number one, is Toni Morrison’s Beloved. It’s not at all modernist, but it is similar to modernism in that you read the first chapter and have no idea what’s going on–you have to work, keep reading, and you start to untangle the story and meaning. There is something so satisfying about that. Morrison intended a challenging experience for readers and it’s gorgeous writing. So it is just the most amazing book to teach!

My favorite fairy tale to teach is Bluebeard. I structure the course saying we’ll start with men as princes, finish with men as predators, and in the end we’ll find out that it’s all mixed up the whole time. It’s this very feminist course and I think students get a feel for that lens, they’re seeing patterns, but then you get to Bluebeard and you’re not ready for it (it’s probably the tale they most likely haven’t had previous exposure to in the Western tradition)-- we ask how does this story even exist, how is this a fairy tale, why does it count as one? And I’m also very excited to teach Mrs. Dalloway this year!

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This piece was written for the Fall 2022 issue of Signature Magazine. Photography by Kaitlin Resler.