Since the start of the 2022-2023 school year, I have been teaching English and Communications at MASH. I have taught 9th, 10th, and 12th grades so far. This page highlights some of my experiences and explains the setting in which I worked.
I am in my third year of teaching at Mechanicsburg Area Senior High School. While here, I teach 3 block classes a day to students in grades 9, 10, and 12.
My classroom here is a pretty diverse one: we have students from a variety of cultures and life experiences. Several of my students are ELs, many have IEPs, GIEPs, or 504s, others are refugees or recent immigrants. The community is growing too, and we are excited to be expanding our staff and building to interact with more people and continue learning about each other and with each other.
I'm thankful too for how much emphasis MASH places on continuing to grow as a professional. There are trainings throughout the year on classroom management and engagement strategies, time set aside to collaborate as a department on the content we teach, and lots of support from additional staff. I am planning on starting my masters soon as well to continue growing in my ability to study and teach literature well.
Photo 1: during English 9; having a guided large group discussion on some key historical context before jumping into reading Homer's Odyssey.
Photo 2: The English department participating in Holiday Sweater Spirit Day! Good colleagues who encourage one another, challenge one another, and grow together make this job much better - I'm thankful for each of these individuals and how they make me a better student and teacher every day.
Photo 3: In the 9th grade, students are tasked with an inquire and explore research paper where they must find reliable sources on a topic of their choosing in preparation for writing a lengthy essay. The brainstorming phase is often the most difficult for many of them, so after a period of unstructured time to generate questions, I support my students who are stuck with question stems like these to get them thinking in new directions.
Photo 4: Our 12th grade class is a communications class that focuses primarily on skills of writing and public speaking. This means that studetns will be challenged to really put themselves and their ideas out in public to be seen and engaged with. This is uncomfortable and quite scary for many of them! To help set the tone, at the beginning of the year I like to talk with my students about what constructive criticism is and is not, and create guidelines for how we will interact with one another in the classroom going forward.
Photo 5: Anchor chart used during the 10th grade's reading of The Lord of the Flies by WIlliam Golding. During this novel study, students were divided into groups and assigned a motif, symbol, and thematic concept to keep track of as they read. Periodically they would meet with their group to discuss their observations and make hypotheses about the deeper meanings these objects adn ideas helped to communicate, then they were jigsawed into other groups to teach their peers about their own symbols and hear about the ones they were not paying as much attention to. Later on, at the end of the novel, the students used their collected evidence to write literary analyses connecting these devices to a larger idea about our world.