I think in some ways English is a misnamed department, but I really think that writing is, at least for me, the more important skill. It’s a really important skill that helps people go out into the world and change it. Also, I think it also helps people look internally and change themselves as well and recognize that change. I’m a big fan of journaling, and my students do a lot of reflection.
I think there’s a lot of really large ways [Andover] differs as far as culture… It changes the way students and teachers work together. The teaching I was doing in Japan was very siloed: you were in the English classroom and you were nowhere else, and you just had to talk about those things and didn’t necessarily comment on things outside of your purview, but here, as faculty at a boarding school, we are involved in [students’] lives in so many ways, [so] we also can listen and give advice, and comment and interact in a huge variety of ways… which I think is something that’s really cool about boarding communities.
Last year, I was a little bit more involved in the [Community and Multicultural Development] (CaMD) office and I had the opportunity to be slightly more involved in some of the All-School Meetings (ASMs). So, Jose Olivares’ visit last fall was really amazing, because I got to go to the pre-dinner, listen to the ASM, go to the post-reception, and that was really incredible. Then the really great joy of that was that I had been his person to walk him from this building to the next building, and we’d spoken about his forthcoming collection, as it was October at the time, the collection was coming out in January, and he was telling me about how it had sonnets, [its] themes and stuff like that. So, this year, I ordered that book for my kids that had been published last January.
I think one thing that’s surprising and also incredibly impressive is the students’ collective time management to do all the things [they do]. To be passionate and excel and push yourselves to do so many different things so well, that’s really quite inspiring [and] very impressive.
As a teaching fellow, we get to observe a lot of our colleagues, and we also have an assigned departmental teaching fellow mentor. So, my mentor was Garrett Ritchie, [Instructor in English], and I got to be very inspired by him. Sometimes, I can be a little bit rigid, and he’s very fluid, and so, it was good to have that kind of influence. I also talked with [Coreen] Martin, [Instructor in English], a lot about what she’s doing in her class, and I feel very inspired by how she runs her class being in collaboration with her students. It feels [less] like I’m a teacher and you are a student and it’s a hierarchy.
I’ve been coaching either Ultimate Frisbee or Disc games both in the fall and spring season, and working with some affinity groups. I was working with Asian Women Empowerment for both years and then I worked with the MCMP, the Mixed Community Mentorship Program, which had a little bit of a rough year with [little] leadership. That’s been super fun to help guide the board meetings and go to the events. I think as far as the balance, it’s very similar to the kind of balance that [students] have to work on [themselves], occasionally saying “no” to things. A couple of my students are involved in the Baking Club, and they had to ask me if I wanted to chaperone. I had chaperoned one of their previous sessions, which is always very fun and productive and gets work done. Then at the end they give you some food, which is really nice. But sometimes I have to just say, “No, I have too much,” especially right now where this is my largest sport time. I have to find time and other ways to get that back.
An excellent book that also continues to influence me is “The Phantom Tollbooth” [by Norton Juster], which is children’s literature. I think, every time I read it, it reminds me of how I felt as a child and how much possibility and creativity there was [in being a child] that it features in a lot of one-off chapters where you meet an interesting, cool character. There’s a boy [who is] in the air and his feet grow to the ground instead of his head growing to the sky, or there’s an average family and they have two parents, two children, and then they have a half child who’s only [on] the left side or something like that. I only reread it almost every year just because it’s a fun story but also because it reminds me of a certain state of life that I wish I could retain as [I] get older. You feel a lot of pressure to lose the kind of childlike whimsical mindset that you had.
I do a variety of things. One thing I’m doing is singing in a local choral group, the Andover Choral Society… It’s been around for a really long time, so that’s been super fun. I also do a lot of my own pleasure reading. I do a lot of jigsaw puzzles [and] Sudoku. I do visual art drawing, retro games, [and] board games.
I’m a big fan of under-ripe cantaloupe, which means that the [Paresky] Commons cantaloupe is perfectly under-ripe for me. So, I always eat that a lot. They have some good soups too. I started having soup again because there’s never a line at the soup line. I guess I [also] like the French toast on Sundays.
Writing is super important. I guess there are writing goals, but I hope that English class can also be a place where you experience happiness and joy and [the] love of literature. I think, written somewhere in the course of study, they talk about reading for pleasure. That’s something that can sometimes be dampened when you have to read for homework that you forget, and so that’s something I want to try and keep alive in my class… Sometimes, when I come in, I’ll just ask people, “What did you think about the reading… What did you like, [or] what did you dislike?”, and not just literary analysis, but [instead], “You read this thing, what is your critique of it?” So that’s always the first route people go to, that you always want to criticize something… Whenever I walk out of a movie, I’m always like “I would have done this differently.” For books, we want to do the same thing. I hope that also is something that has a place in my classroom.
