Experienced: I have had tremendous success teaching in the public school system as a faculty staff member at the elementary, middle school and high school levels. Since memory is so closely tied to emotion, I strive to make learning fun with the active and engaging learning activities that I incorporate into my teaching practice.
Licensed: I am fully licensed in Oregon and California from preschool to 12th grade, having met course requirements for both teaching licenses, passing state content exams, and doing student teaching at both the elementary and secondary levels. I received my masters degree and teaching credential from California Lutheran University, which has an NCATE rating for its College of Education.
Workshops: Besides my tutoring business, I teach workshops for the Lake Oswego School District Community School and the Lake Oswego Parks and Recreation Department.
Service: I am a very active volunteer in the community with organizations that promote literacy and services for families and children such as the Portland Literacy Council, where I am on the board of directors and the Lake Oswego Women’s Club where I am also on the board.
Balanced: The experiences of raising three children, volunteering to teach reluctant and struggling Title 1 and adult GED students, and teaching in the public school system have given me unique insight into the valuable strategies that I present at my workshops and in my private tutoring.
Why I Love Swans and Ducklings: The method of using fairy tales to explain the abstract concepts of theme, irony and rhetorical argumentation is one of my common teaching practices and is relevant at all grade levels given its complexity in the correct context. The swan and duckling images representing my business are in no way accidental, but have a deeply personal meaning.
When I was in high school many years ago, I stumbled upon an essay by Pablo Neruda, the famous poet, who had recently been awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature and who had also won a Pulitzer Prize just some years before. This essay profoundly affected me and to this day, it is indelible in my mind.
Shortly thereafter, I also took on the story of the Ugly Duckling as a writing piece of similar personal significance, representing the coming of age and redemption of overcoming the pain and awkwardness of adolescence. Whether you are popular or not, it is a lonely path to walk when you are either a struggling or a very bright student. When I share these stories and countless others with my students and their parents, they begin to realize the significance of studying literature for its inherent beauty and as a key to understanding the human experience.
Here is the essay: What Do We Know About Swans?
On Lake Budi some years ago, they were hunting down the swans without mercy. The procedure was to approach them stealthily in little boats and then rapidly—very rapidly—row into their midst. Swans have difficulty in flying; they must skim the surface of the water at a run. In the first phase of their flight, they raise their big wings with great effort. It is then that they can be seized; a few blows with a bludgeon finish them off.
Someone made me a present of a swan: more dead than alive. It was of a marvelous species I have never seen anywhere in the world: a black-throated swan—a snow boat with a neck packed, as it were, into a tight stocking of black silk. Orange—beaked, red—eyed.
They brought it to me half-dead. I bathed its wounds and pressed little pellets of bread and fish into its throat: but nothing stayed down. Nevertheless, the wounds slowly healed, and the swan came to regard me as a friend. At the same time, it was apparent to me that the bird was wasting away with nostalgia. So, cradling the heavy burden in my arms through the streets, I carried it to the river. It paddled a few strokes, very close to me. I had hoped it might learn to fish for itself, and pointed to some pebbles far below, where they flashed in the sand like silvery fish. The swan looked at them remotely, sad—eyed.
For the next 20 days, I carried the bird to the river and toiled with it to my house. One afternoon, it seemed more abstracted than usual, swimming very close and ignoring the lure of insects with which I tried vainly to tempt it to fish again. It became very quiet: so I lifted it into my arms to carry it home again. It was breast high, when I suddenly felt a great ribbon unfurl, like a black arm encircling my face: it was the big coil of the neck dropping down.
It was then I learned that swans do not sing at their death, if they die of grief.
--Pablo Neruda
This is the original last paragraph of the Ugly Duckling, as written by Hans Christian Anderson in 1844. (He admitted on many occasions that this tale mirrored his own life.)
“Then he felt quite ashamed, and hid his head under his wing; for he did not know what to do, as he was so happy and yet not at all proud. He had been persecuted and despised for his ugliness, and now he heard them say he was the most beautiful of all the birds. Even the elder tree bent down its bows into the water before him, and the son shone warm and bright. Then he rustled his feathers, curved his slender neck, and cried joyfully, from the depths of his heart, “I never dreamed of such happiness as this, while I was an ugly duckling.”
