Hello, my name is Kate! I am a trained philosopher, amateur scientist, and experienced teacher. I'm from New York, but moved to Boston in 2020 to attend Northeastern University for undergrad. As the story goes, I'd harbored some discontents with my education since childhood and now school was online. The disruption of in-person life was unnamably frustrating and I was shocked to also feel under-equipped approaching my college coursework. I thought about dropping out a lot, driven by a revived passion for the failures of education. Instead, I used our co-op program to spend the latter half of my 3rd year substitute teaching for 6 months, covering about every position at a K-8 school. There in Brookline, I fell in love with working with kids. In my newly found free time, I'd read up on human development and found increasingly fascinating the modern construction of the "child." I'd pick apart children's books for their language and themes and slowly piece together an understanding of our educational project writ large. In all, I became obsessed with the ideas to be found in this field, both normative and descriptive: What was school meant to be doing? What's actually getting done? I applied to Teach for America to get into my own classroom as soon as possible, somewhere I could really make a change. I wasn't too surprised to be slotted into science teaching given my background in physics. What has surprised me, though, is every bit of the way since. For 2 years I've taught 8th grade science while pursing my Masters in Education at Boston University. The collection of experiences I've had have dramatically transformed my thoughts on education.
