As a senior in high school looking for a strong interdisciplinary background in the liberal arts and sciences with a focus on English literature, taught by incredibly diverse faculty, I found Geneseo's English department a natural fit. Over the course of my time as an English major, I pursued not only English literature with an American Studies minor, but also a New York State certification to teach middle school and high school students. As I read, debated, and discussed writers from across the canon, I worked alongside fellow English majors who would ask that frustrating but enlightening question: Why? This attention to detail and open-mindedness from fellow students served me well when faced with real-life students as I began my student teaching senior year. I worked in an inner-city school in Rochester, and then in Ghana as part of Geneseo's student teaching program. The opportunity to live and work with Ghanaian students who were learning to speak English as a second language sparked my curiosity in how one learns to read; that old question — Why? — came up again. My Geneseo background instilled that question in me permanently.
After graduation, I began a master's in Curriculum and Teaching at Columbia University with a focus on becoming a Literacy Specialist. Over that year, I studied the foundational skills and building blocks of reading, and how to recognize and work with students with reading disabilities. I conducted research under the guidance of the staff developers at the Teachers College Reading and Writing Project, and worked in New York City public schools. Whenever I would think about why I was working to reach struggling students, I would remember how happy I was reading and writing about great works of art at Geneseo, and how much literature can teach us about ourselves and life itself. I had always loved reading from the start, and Geneseo had fostered that to the fullest extent. It was now my time to help students uncover that same love of literature.
I have just finished my first year teaching in my own classroom, at a public school on the Upper West Side in Manhattan. I think that my degree in English is the most important part of my teaching background because instead of getting bogged down in state test scores and measurable data, I know that in my heart, I believe teaching someone to read is the most powerful gift you can give them, and when they learn to love it, I can help them discover writers who speak to their soul. That was the gift that Geneseo gave me.