Teaching
Taught literature at Columbia's undergraduate symposium and Stanford's Great Books program. Also worked as an IB/AP Literature tutor — helping students find their own relationship with texts, not just the "right" interpretation.
At Columbia, I taught in the undergraduate symposium — leading discussions that brought together texts from different literary traditions. The focus was always on what happens between the reader and the text, not on arriving at a predetermined interpretation.
I was drawn to the moments when a student would say something like "I don't know why this passage bothers me" — because that's where the real reading begins. The discomfort is the signal. My job was to help them stay with it long enough to hear what it was saying.
At Stanford, I facilitated seminars in the Great Books program — reading canonical texts alongside contemporary work, always asking: what does this text want from you? Not what does it mean in the abstract, but what does it stir, challenge, or reveal in you specifically?
This is where my bibliotherapy training and my literature training converged. A great seminar, like a great therapy session, creates the conditions for something to surface that wasn't accessible before.
Working one-on-one with high school students preparing for IB and AP Literature exams. The goal was never just exam prep — it was helping students develop their own reading voice. How do you write about a text you genuinely care about? How do you trust your own response?
Many of these students had been trained to look for "the right answer" in literature. My work was to unteach that habit — to show them that their confusion, their emotional response, their half-formed hunches are the raw material of real literary thinking.
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