- Come the end of School Year 2018-2019, I will have been in the Cherry Hill School District for 2.9 years (give or take a few days), and hope to be here for several years to come.
- I've taught for about 10 years now, with 7 years over in Bucks County, PA, with several years of 1-2 classes at Middle Schools thrown in. Between 2002-2005, I was also a Teaching Assistant for various courses of German as I worked on my degree. I have a Masters in Modern German Culture from Indiana University Bloomington, and a Masters in Secondary Education from La Salle University.
- I teach the one subject area that ALL STUDENTS have prior exposure to (and have demonstrated success in, namely: ACQUIRING A LANGUAGE!
- I firmly believe (and have increase affirmative evidence of!) the statement that everyone can be successful in my language class. The onus is on me to make my class brain-friendly and comprehensible. I do my best to do this, and improve each new year in this aim. I think that a lot of kids see how earnest I am about this, and I get a lot of buy-in from that. Increasingly, I get more buy-in, too, because more and more kids are leaving CHE as competent, Intermediate-level or better speakers of German. As students realize that people don't become successful language students by filling out a lot of worksheets, they realize that the real rigor is participating with engaged minds in lessons that are designed around high-interest topics and personalized material created by the class.
- One of my favorite TV shows is Legends of Tomorrow. I love the diversity, I love the people-positive golden thread in the writing, I love the leitmotif of working-together-as-deus-machina. [I also love Blacklist, MacGyver and Alias.]
- I love that there are more and more German-language shows available on Netflix and Amazon. I really enjoy Dark on Netflix, and wish that TV show Schmidt: Chaos auf Rezept would come back.