OBJECTIVE
Dedicated and dynamic, pursuing a career teaching secondary level English Language Arts 7th through 12th grades.
RELEVANT EXPERIENCE
Apr. to June 2008 – West Islip High School – Leave replacement teacher
1 Lion’s Path, West Islip, NY (631) 504-5805
Took charge of five periods: two 9th grade regular classes, two 10th grade honors classes, and an elective class, Advanced Word Power, an intensive vocabulary class. Also collaborated with colleagues in proctoring and evaluating the 11th grade English Reagents exams at the end of the school year.
· Advanced Word Power: Constructed language projects and practice puzzles to ensure students’ maximum exposure to vocabulary definitions within realistic contexts.
· 9th grade regular: Created a unit plan to teach Mitch Albom’s The Five People You Meet in Heaven which gave students varied ways of showing their knowledge: PowerPoint presentations on the different settings in the story, pop music connections to themes or characters, daily journaling about issues related to themes, guided reading questions for homework, chapter and vocab quizzes, and oral discussions.
· 10th grade honors: Formulated a unit plan to teach Elie Wiesel’s Night by focusing on language features that improve students composition skills: syntax, diction, imagery details, and rhetorical devices such as anaphora. Please visit our class wiki where students utilized their understanding of the connotation of words to write original poetry inspired by Wiesel’s Holocaust experience, and illuminated portions of the text (hypertext) to show their personal interpretation of the narrative: http://10h7thperiodnight.wetpaint.com/
Sep. to Dec. 2007 – Half Hollow Hills School District – Student teacher
525 Half Hollow Road, Dix Hills, NY (631) 592-3000
West Hollow MS: Created a unit-plan to teach O. Henry’s short story “A Retrieved Reformation” and Cynthia Rylant’s “A Crush” to 7th grade regular classes:
- Developed pre and post-reading strategies such as utilizing pop culture connections (the title song from a beloved TV sitcom) to familiarize students with the elements of a plot diagram: rising action, climax, exposition, etc.
- Devised tiered lessons to differentiate both process and product for multi-level students: for a writing assignment that required different points of view, the students were matched to the point of view with the adequate degree of difficulty for their individual ability; first person is easier to achieve than third person limited, for example.
- Organized cooperative groups and technology tasks such as Hyperlinked texts, Blogs, and PowerPoint slide shows to highlight language and composition features: figurative language, imagery, point of view, syntax and details.
High School East: Developed hands-on projects to help blended 10th grade classes maneuver the difficult language of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein:
- An art project as a pre-reading activity to foster personal connections to the story’s themes.
- Cutting a script as directors and producers to ensure close reading of text.
- A film project of one of the chapters to help comprehension.
- A Web Quest as a research project to understand biblical and mythological allusions of the story.
- Introduced the graphic novel as an auxiliary text to review themes and plot before the test.
Jan. 2007 to Apr. 2008 – Sachem School District – Substitute teacher
245 Union Av., Holbrook, NY (631) 471-1370
- Implemented lessons at both the High School and Middle School level.
- Developed invaluable experience in classroom management, flexibility, and problem solving.
Jan. to June 2007 – Stony Brook Writing Center – One-on-one writing tutor
Stony Brook University, Stony Brook, NY (631) 632-7405
· Taught college students to improve composition skills: rhetorical knowledge, paragraph unity and transitions, and relationship to thesis.
· Developed skills to help ESL students adjust to the rhetorical conventions of English composition.
EDUCATION
2004 to Dec. 2007 – M. A. T. in English/ Secondary English Education – 3.95 G.P.A.
Stony Brook University – Stony Brook, NY
Methods of teaching literature and writing through the use of performance and technology.
2000 to 2003 – B. A. in English Literature – 3.95 G.P.A.
Stony Brook University – Stony Brook, NY
Concentration in British Renaissance Literature and Drama, especially Shakespeare.
1996 to 2000 – A. A. Liberal Arts; English major – 4.00 G.P.A.
Suffolk Community College – Selden, NY
RELEVANT COURSEWORK
· Methods of Teaching English with Performance and Technology
· Studies in Shakespeare
· Shakespeare’s Comedies
· Shakespeare’s Tragedies
· Contemporary African American Women
· Contemporary Native American Fiction
· Holocaust Literature
· Honors College Senior Thesis:
“Depictions of Female Sexuality in Contemporary Film and RenaissanceDrama”
HONORS & AFFILIATIONS
· Stony Brook Honors College graduate
· SCCC Foundation Academic Achievement Award
· Lillian DeWaal scholarship
· SCCC Harry Crooke Writing Award
· National Council of Teachers of English member
PRESENTATIONS
· NCTE – National Council of Teachers of English convention in Manhattan, NY – Nov. 2007
· LILAC – Long Island Language Arts Council convention in Melville, NY – Apr. 2007
Multi-modal Literacy: YouTube, Wikis, PodCasts, and WebQuests –“Teaching Literature with Today’s and Tomorrow’s Technology.” Approaches and resources for easy integration of technology into the English secondary classroom in order to make literary content more exciting and relevant for students.
SKILLS
Technology: I am skilled at creating WebQuests, Wikis, Blogs, and on-line portfolios with Googlepages, and at utilizing PodCasts and Final Cut film editing software, and I am competent at all multimedia presentation and word processing software as well as in the use of online communication systems such as Turn It In, E-Board and Infinite Campus, including electronic Grade Book to help manage students’ grades and other relevant information. Please visit my e-portfolio to sample some technological projects: http://gil.luisa.googlepages.com
Languages: 1. Portuguese – Native proficiency at oral, reading, and writing level. 2. Spanish – Basic oral and reading ability.