Hi all!
Now that I’ve had the opportunity to virtually meet all of you on Zoom, I thought I’d take the time to properly introduce myself.
I have been living in New York City (on and off) for the past 16 years. I completed both my undergraduate and my graduate studies at a school called The New School where I majored in Cultural and Media Studies for my BA and Applied Linguistics for my MA.
I’ve just completed my first year teaching at Baruch (yay!), and I’ve been teaching English in some capacity for almost 10 years. My teaching career began as an elementary school English teacher in Daegu, South Korea, where I lived from 2012-2014. After that, I spent a few months traveling around Asia. After returning to New York City, I worked part-time at a media company for 2 years. Here, I produced content for the company’s social media outlets. At the same time, I began to teach ESL to adults at a private language school in Manhattan, (my office was on the 63rd floor of the Empire State Building!). After completing my Masters, I began teaching at several colleges and universities in New York City. In fact, I have taught in 4 of the 5 boroughs (Brooklyn, Manhattan, Queens, and the Bronx). This is my third term teaching fully online and I am excited about sharing a new teaching and learning experience with all of you.
In my free time I like to ride my bike, go hiking/birdwatching, and experiment with new recipes (I’m not a great cook, though–much better at eating). Last summer, I also took an online class about tree identification, planting, and pruning. One day, I’m hoping to volunteer with city parks so that I can help take care of the trees. I also love old school JRPGs (think PS1–yeah, I guess I’m old). I don’t have a lot of free time to play them anymore, but I’m currently working on Final Fantasy IX.
My goals for this course are to help each of you improve individually while also maintaining a strong sense of community within our new classroom environment. Collaboration, discussion, teamwork, and creativity are just a few of the qualities I find most important for building a solid foundation for undergraduate course work.
Finally, I have an “open door policy,” which means that you should never feel afraid or ashamed to contact me if you have any questions. I’m very much looking forward to working with all of you this semester.