About Me
I am a teacher. There is nothing I enjoy more than spending my days with kids. I began my career not in education, but in design, After a dozen years in the field, I began to feel restless. While I still enjoyed the creative challenge of designing corporate identities, brochures, ads, and, as the work migrated to the digital space, websites, I began to ask if there was something else that would spark my passion.
When my daughter entered first grade, I volunteered to work with the seventh-grade technology class. Each day, when the bell rang to end the period and the kids filed out, my heart sank. Ugh, I thought, now I have to return to the world of adults. I had been looking for a sign for what might come next, and I followed that desire to figure out how I could spend my days in school with kids.
With the help of the Golden Apple Foundation, partnered with Northwestern University, I was accepted into their rapid transition career-changers program. In one summer of full-time course work followed by a school year of night classes paired with first-year teaching, I made the transition. I taught at a Chicago K-8 public school, staying eight years and teaching grades 1 and 5. As part of a big city public system, the school dealt with all the bureaucracy, nonsense, and large class sizes of any school, yet managed to succeed with smart, capable, and compassionate staff and administration and strong community support. I loved teaching there, and along the way, I finished a master’s degree and completed National Board Certification.
Then, suddenly, a dramatic fork in the road that we hadn’t anticipated appeared: a chance to move overseas to teach at a private Christian international school. We decided we just couldn’t pass up that opportunity and made the move, selling or giving away most of our possessions, renting out our house, and packing up our three kids aged 9, 11, and 14 and moved to Nairobi, Kenya. I taught middle school English for five years and then switched to high school for four, staying nine years – a lot longer than we had imagined we would. Along the way, we gained a love for expat life, for different cultures and international travel, and I reignited my long-dormant passion for high school theatre, directing and working on 20 plays and musicals. This chapter came to a close following the 2020-21 (Covid) school year when our youngest graduated high school.
In the months leading up to our move back to the US – which we were doing primarily to be closer to our three kids who were all in the States now, as well as our parents – I began to think about the sort of school I would want to work in next. I hoped to find a place of great creativity, a progressive school where I could do many of the things I believed had served kids best. Over the years and across all grade levels, the best things I had ever done, I reflected, had at their core a self-directedness, student choice, creativity, and trust in children’s capability. It has always been one of my central beliefs that kids can do far more than most people believe, including their parents, teachers, and themselves.
My search began in the usual places – Montessori and Waldorf and other models on the more progressive end of the spectrum. This is when I discovered a growing movement of schools and learning centers that really took those qualities to the outer limit – the world of Self-Directed Education. Through a series of TED Talks, articles, and books, I was challenged and inspired to think even more deeply about how much and what sort of support young people need. Learning is a natural human trait. It doesn’t need to be taught. And school, in many cases and for many kids, diminishes rather than nurtures this natural love of learning.
How can we do better?
