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Travel along the timeline of my working life --->

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Travel along the timeline of my working life --->

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...from my first W-4 form until today!

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Baked Potato Sales - Renaissance Festival

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Baked Potato Sales - Renaissance Festival

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My first non-babysitting job was at the age of 14 at the Renaissance Fair. A few friends and I thought this would be the *best* job. It was definitely an experience.

I wore this costume (that's me on the right) and stood next to a very large, extremely hot oven that rotated a long train of baked potatoes on humid summer weekends in Minnesota.  We cautiously grabbed them from the oven, cracked them open, and slathered them with toppings, trying to avoid  burning ourselves or slicing our fingers. (I have one scar still today.) We were asked to yell, "Huzzah! 20 pounds for the king!" whenever anyone paid with a $20 bill.

SKILLS: showing up very early, laundering the costume regularly, customer service, collaborating with teenage coworkers, food safety, sense of humor

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One of my best friends and I shared a job working as the receptionist at a hair salon in the local mall. It was fun to answer the phones and feel grown up and to carefully write appointments in the appointment book. It smelled nice and the mall provided good people watching. The best part was that since we both worked there we could hide notes for each other in the nooks of the reception desk.

SKILLS: fitting work in around school and sports and clubs, customer service, penmanship, organization, being trusted to lock up

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I served on the "Leaders-in-Training" team of young people collaborating with adults to make decisions about youth programming and other aspects in a local community organization.

We did fun activities like canoeing in the Boundary Waters (above) and collaborating with peers, but this was also my training in how to plan collaboratively with adults and how to run effective meetings.

I've often noticed as an adult that organizational team skills like making a workable agenda are often not taught, and this can have many negative impacts on organizational work.

At the time I thought, "I'm helping out," but this experience prepared me well for a lot more work and leadership ahead than I realized.

SKILLS: meetings, collaboration, friendship, peer and adult friendships, outdoors skills, mentorship, organization (both serious and fun)

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My senior year of high school I participated in a program called the Mentor Connection through an "intermediate district" that brought students together from the metro area for a unique type of learning.

We had placements in the community based on our interests for our futures. At the time I was thinking International Relations, so I was placed on a committee with former Governor Al Quie to welcome the King of Norway to Minnesota. This was an experience very much outside of my realm (no monarchy pun intended) and I would love to go back and read my notes or journals from this time.

The second half of the year was spent with Minnesota Advocates for Human Rights (now The Advocates) where I helped with various programs around their office and designed a human rights speakers series for my classmates back at my high school.

We also had Mentor Connection classes where we learned about things like professional networks and other aspects of "professionalism" that required a very large 3-ring binder.  We had to do things like visit a University library and keep a contact log of people we met in our work.

I participated in this program because I was ready for something different from high school. Looking back, I can't say the thrill of networking grabbed me, but it was really valuable to be part of life outside of the school environment and learn more about how people craft their lives.

SKILLS: interacting with all kinds of people, learning about the world beyond Minnesota, networking and record-keeping, diplomatic norms, visiting new parts of the city, office life, cold-calling and asking people to speak, hosting speakers in my school, creating a learning guide to the speaker series, navigating different cultural norms (and making mistakes while doing so)

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This was my summer job before college and, like the Leaders-in-Training program, it is one of the roles that gave me skills I use most today.

This may sound silly, but being comfortable navigating copy machines, different types of binders and staplers and the nuanced strategies of collation has served me as an artist, a small business owner, and definitely as a teacher. It helped me think about how to create interesting things from simple materials, how to efficiently organize multi-step processes, and how to work with someone else to create the vision in their head. Thanks Kinkos!

I also worked with people several years older than I was and learned about college life, being a struggling graduate student, and being a young 20-something employed and not going to college. I learned a lot!

SKILLS: how to work 3rd shift, independently completing multi-step projects designed by people I had not met, using various machinery and computer equipment, customer service, precision work (the bulk paper cutter!) with heavy machinery, interacting effectively with coworkers

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University of Minnesota - B.A. Studio Arts

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University of Minnesota - B.A. Studio Arts

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1996-2000

summa cum laude
phi beta kappa

Course work in fine arts, English literature, Anthropology, Cultural Studies

I officially studied art but I studied so many things, from colonialism to Buddhism to cultural anthropology to leisure studies. (Maybe one of my best classes! Have you ever really  thought about the impact the mass availability of clocks had on human life?)

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I lived at the Students’ Coop at the University of Minnesota from 1997-2000, a household of about 28 students (and three bathrooms!), owning and running the house together.

I learned so many skills of adulthood at the Co-op.  I learned how to work with others to complete home maintenance projects. I learned how to shop in bulk to sustain a large group of people. I learned about the basics of cooking,   improvising with the ingredients on hand to make something healthy and edible.

I learned that you can form a community with very different people and figure out how to make that community work *together.* I learned that I need alone space and time, but that it is also good for me to be able to chat with an unexpected housemate in the living room in the middle of a late night study session to gain new perspective. Some of my oldest friends are from the co-op.

I gained a sense of community and ownership over our shared spaces. I learned about different economic systems. I was inspired to investigate intentional communities as part of an expedition with the U-YWCA, and to consider how we connect to people beyond our immediate family units.

My co-op experience inspires me in my work today as a middle and high school teacher, building new communities with groups of students each year.

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My friend and I took a 6-week position traveling to campuses on the east coast with a large van full of dorm room posters. We arrived to town, set up the sale, took it down each night, repeated it the next day, and drove to the next city. We visited campuses in cities we'd never been to and only had one small vehicle accident involving a restaurant awning.

This was a very strange, exhausting job and also very cool to be trusted with such an operation at a relatively young age. It taught me how much of business is a feat of trust and improvisation.

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This was my job during my last years of college, delivering sandwiches to coffee shops around the Twin Cities at night. I discovered public radio in this van and got to know new parts of the city. The company was owned by a couple and staffed by some of their family members and again I saw how small businesses are made up of people working together to make some sort of magic happen.

Of note is that this was pre-9/11 and we delivered to the airport, driving into a loading dock and making our way up to the retail area. There was a simple badge we used, but I imagine that part of the job changed significantly a year later.

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National Student Exchange - Fairbanks, Alaska

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National Student Exchange - Fairbanks, Alaska

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Courses in fine arts, Native Arts, Alaskan Art History and American Studies

Instead of a more expensive year abroad, I took advantage of the National Student exchange program to spend spring semester at the University of Alaska Fairbanks. It was only light out from 10am-3pm when I first arrived, usually 20 degrees below zero (Fahrenheit). You had to make sure every inch of your skin was covered and that you didn't get between a mom and baby moose on the walk to campus. The cold weather encouraged me to get to know the campus library well and check out lots of weird old movies.

I also worked in the concession stand at the gym for events and Destiny's Child performed, which I did not fully appreciate at the time. (I'm wiser now.)

Y2K also occurred while I was there and...nothing happened.

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Korean International School, Tianjin, China

I spent 8 months or so in Tianjin, China, while my now-husband was studying at Nankai University. I took a job at a brand new school, teaching English elementary school students from Korea--winging it, mostly. I also tutored a business man who worked for a hot chocolate company! I didn't know that this would connect to work I'd be doing twenty years later, but I enjoyed the many creative challenges of these teaching roles.

This was my first long-term stay out of the country, both challenging and fascinating, living with a cohort of international students in the dormitories.

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AmeriCorps Service- In the Heart of the Beast Puppet and Mask Theatre

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AmeriCorps Service- In the Heart of the Beast Puppet and Mask Theatre

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I returned to the U.S. and joined AmeriCorps. Our first day of training was on 9/11, a strange way to begin.

I was part of a cohort of young women who served in various youth and community organizations in the Twin Cities. I served at In the Heart of the Beast Puppet and Mask Theatre. We helped out behind the scenes at the theatre, sometimes appeared on stage, helped with school residencies and summer programs, and of course the massive May Day Parade and Festival in the spring. I did everything from designing curriculum to use with teens to gluing hundreds of tiny fabric triangles onto larger pieces of fabric.

My AmeriCorps cohort was probably one of the most diverse groups of people I'd worked with at that point in my life, and we learned about fundamentals of youth work and related job skills, and I believe this was also the first time I heard about the work of Alfie Kohn, from a guest speaker, and it blew my mind.

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I reconnected with a classmate from the U of M who had an arts business making kettubah, personal, sacred artworks in the Jewish tradition for weddings. I learned about this unique combination of art and legal documents and helped  with many aspects of making this unique business work, from sourcing materials to crafting small parts, to testing new methods, and organizing business record keeping.

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I spent some time in the bureaucracy of the USPS, serving as a Reserve Carrier, which means I filled in on the days off of a much more experienced mail carrier.

This job required time management, the ability to do long and tedious tasks (mail sorting) as quickly as possible and to not get distracted by the cool magazines people subscribed to. I had no idea that the mail sorting was the main part of the job and that, though pre-sorted by machines, it was also very manual.

You then have to organize the boxes strategically and place them carefully in the tin-can of a truck so that they wouldn't tip over and cause mail chaos.

I got to know the people on my route and their preferences and I had to get up extremely early and realized once again how many things there are that make our lives work smoothly that we really take for granted. I also learned that many mail carriers are military service members who are able to apply their service years to their USPS years--a whole subculture I hadn't been aware of.

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Substitute Teacher - Minneapolis Public Schools

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Substitute Teacher - Minneapolis Public Schools

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A friend was subbing at Minneapolis Public Schools on a special license so I decided to try it, too. I remember working with sand tables for the first time in an early childhood classroom and being lucky to attend a roller skating field trip with a middle school.

A defining moment of this experience was working on a longer-term assignment at a special school site for students labelled with emotional and behavioral disorders and who were no longer in a mainstream setting. I had never been in such a setting before. It was challenging, but interesting, and I liked the kids, even if the environment sometimes felt cold (things were fairly locked down).

The principal mentioned that there might be an opening to continue helping at the school. That didn't end up panning out, but in the process I met with an acquaintance at Hopkins High School who did similar work, which led me to becoming a Special Education Paraprofessional in her classroom the next two years, which shaped so much of my understanding of working with teens.

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Special Education Paraprofessional - Hopkins High School

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Special Education Paraprofessional - Hopkins High School

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I spent two school years as a Special Education Paraprofessional in a classroom for students labelled with emotional and behavioral disorders. That sounds clinical, but our classroom was a safe home base for students who completed coursework in our small, friendly setting for part of the day, and went out to the larger school for other parts of the day.

We worked on social emotional skills, read books together, built life schemas through different daily routines, celebrated birthdays, and collaborated with families and health care workers who also supported the students.

At the time I was not planning to go into education long term, but this job taught me so much about teens and what they need, how schools can be alienating and isolating to those who don't fit the "norm", about mental health struggles and how to support kids where they are at. I also worked alongside a very experienced and organized teacher whose methods and approaches left a big impression on me.

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Since my time studying art as an undergraduate student, I have made art. This work has taken different forms at different times, sometimes involving shows and sales, and sometimes being more personal and for myself.

Making art crosses many skill lines--fine arts craft and technique; small business management; conceptual and intellectual ideas and aesthetics;  physical practicalities like storage and preservation; making community connections. The arts are so much more than just an image on a wall.

I was fortunate to participate in artists' residencies in Ontario, Canda, and Oaxaca, Mexico, to collaborate in community arts events like the Art Swap,  to intern at the awesome Cave Paper Studio in Minneapolis, and host arts events at my wellness studio in Minneapolis.

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The Art Swap was a community arts event a few friends and I created as part of the Art Shanties Project on Medicine Lake in Minnesota. Art Shanty artists create unique arts experiences in modified fishing shacks on a frozen lake in the Twin Cities.

The Art Swap was a space where people brought a work of art they'd made and traded it for someone else's within the four walls of the Art Swap Shanty. We took "I brought" and "I got" photos to document the trades, which went on a website.  It was great fun and it was fascinating to see people make rules for themselves about what was a fair trade, and also to see what people would bring out to the middle of a frozen lake!

We recreated the swap later as part of other community arts events, including Northern Spark Festival, Walker Open Field, and Storefront in a Box.

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Wellness Practitioner & Small Business Owner

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Wellness Practitioner & Small Business Owner

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While working as a special education paraprofessional I studied a Japanese form of bodywork (massage) called Shiatsu, which is based in acupuncture and principles of Chinese Medicine. This was a chance to explore the embodied anatomy and physical science, to do a type of learning the was not only book-based and to consider the human experience in new ways.

I then spent several years as a shiatsu practitioner, sometimes working in collaborative spaces and sometimes owning/co-owning my own space, including Chakra Khan Wellness, which served as a wellness and community arts space for several years in South Minneapolis.

Through this work I learned about mental and physical health and health care systems, collaboration with professional peers, creating retreat and workshop experiences, marketing, business management, and creating aesthetic spaces that support wellness and creativity.

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Inspired by my shiatsu work and wanting to explore the childbirth phase of human development, I spent a year as a volunteer birth doula at a local hospital, supporting birthing people in childbirth.

This doula work was unique in that we typically did not meet the birthing person prior to encountering them in labor. This presented the unique challenge of identifying their needs, their family/partner's needs, and supporting them in a very special and intense moment. This work was challenging and beautiful and awe-inspiring to step out of everyday time and into the welcoming of a new human to our world.

This work required so many human skills and is logistically complex.

It shapes me as an educator as it reminds me of the alchemy of forming a family, through birth or otherwise, and the amazing journey of development that each child is on.

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Operations & HR Manager; Newsletter Editor - Blooma

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Operations & HR Manager; Newsletter Editor - Blooma

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Through my doula work I was connected to a woman named Sarah Longacre, who was about to start a small business called Blooma, which would support families through prenatal yoga and childbirth education. It sounded interesting and I wanted to be involved.

Little did I know I would end up spending years helping this little-business-that-could grow and change. My role expanded into directing the day-to-day operations and human resources systems, to helping with the marketing and software systems that kept the business going. I met so many amazing people and learned so much by doing the work required along the way. We grew from a small staff of about ten to over 45 teachers, childcare workers, and educators.

The photo above was when I was preparing to leave and move to China. They gave me a heart-filled celebration complete with Julie masks (see photo) and t-shirts that said "What Would Julie Do"--which was a silly joke, but also shows how many problems we had figured out how to solve together in those years.

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While living in Shanghai for my husband's work, I connected with the childbirth community and was introduced to ShanghaiMamas, a wonderful organization supporting expat families in navigating life in a new city.

As the ShanghaiMamas administrator, I was able to bring my small business skills from Blooma and elsewhere to help keep the operation running smoothly--managing the back end of the membership website and website redesign, coordinating with advertisers, sending a newsletter digest and assisting in community events.

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Substitute Teacher - Shanghai American School

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Substitute Teacher - Shanghai American School

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During my time in Shanghai I met a friend who worked at Shanghai American School and her joy in her work was so apparent that I asked if there was some way I could get involved with the school, too. She helped me connect to the school as a substitute teacher, and this was the turning point that finally led me to my role as a teacher today.

The school was a welcoming, supportive place that offered students independence and creativity in their work. I loved learning from their young perspectives on the world, getting clued in to new parts of pop culture, and figuring out how to support a room full of pre-teens and teens in working together productively. I realized that a lot of my arts and small business skills were very useful in this setting. It was energizing. This was work I could really get into, I thought. And here I am today!

I also want to add that the wonderful library run by an awesome librarian team really helped me during this time--having access to great books to explore during a time when I was figuring out what was next was so nourishing and supportive.

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UW Madison - Master's in Curriculum & Instruction : ELA and EAL Focus

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UW Madison - Master's in Curriculum & Instruction : ELA and EAL Focus

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My next step was to find a teaching program. I decided to enter the Master's program with secondary licensure at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, due to the School of Ed's excellent reputation, the intriguing leader of the ELA program, Dr. Maisha Winn, and a reciprocity agreement between Minnesota and Wisconsin that meant it was still very expensive, but slightly less so.

I studied for the GRE in Shanghai and took the test with with hundreds of Chinese college students on a very sweaty summer day. I think I took a Praxis test there, too. All of this--plus preparing to return to school after many years--was a journey, to say the least.

I arrived in Madison from Shanghai in June and we hit the ground running with summer internships at local community centers and coursework by distinguished professors who pushed us to consider what and who school was really for. The journey began for real.

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We were lucky to have several sites for student teaching and practicum, which I think was the most valuable part of my program--seeing how different environments and teachers worked. My instinct was to request to try several types of settings and I am so glad I did. They included:

* Wingra School, a progressive democratic private school where I worked with middle schoolers. When we arrived the desks were piled in a corner of the room and they waited for the students to show up and work collaboratively to design how the space should work for them

* Monona Grove High School, a large suburban high school, where I participated in small Special Education support spaces, as well as 9th Grade ELA and a senior honors class. This was informative to see how these spaces were tracked and how things were done differently as a result, in addition to getting the feeling of being back in a large school like my high school.

* LaFollete High School, a medium-sized city school in Madison.  I supported an ESL class and and ELA honors class, where students could self-select into the honors program. I independently designed a science fiction unit, and supported a great unit by the classroom teacher addressing societal issues through fiction and nonfiction texts.

* Malcolm Shabazz High School, an alternative school within  MMSD. This school operated on a unique schedule and structure, with students signing up for topic-based courses more like college courses for several weeks at a time. My cooperating teacher intentionally threw me into the deep end and I created and taught several original courses during this time. It was so challenging but I couldn't have asked for better experience to move towards my first year of teaching! We studied Audre Lorde, pop culture intertextuality, science fiction, and puppet theatre production.

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6th Grade ELA Teacher; Mythology Elective; 10th Grade Summer School  - St. Paul Public Schools

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6th Grade ELA Teacher; Mythology Elective; 10th Grade Summer School  - St. Paul Public Schools

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Teaching in St. Paul Public Schools I served as a 6th Grade ELA teacher in two different settings (a 6-12 school and a 6-8 school) and also taught summer school for two years working with 10th graders on ELA credit recovery.  In both of my regular school year jobs I also led an advisory and in the middle school I taught a mixed-grade Mythology elective and served as a member of the school leadership team.

Though in the same district, each of these settings was unique. Being in 6th grade in a high school feels very different from being in a 6-8 school. My first school had a majority immigrant and refugee population, and my second school was more of a mix of students, though the school  historically had been more white and affluent. I learned a lot about how these factors impacted on school culture, and how a school's history might slow change and critical reflection due to attachments to tradition--these are complex forces.

6th graders require a gentle touch. They are often so overwhelmed by the many new demands placed on them--this overwhelm lasts until May for some students. In my three years with this age group I grew to appreciate the uniquely challenging position 6th graders are in, just leaving elementary, still quite young, suddenly in with the big kids. I learned a lot from my 6th graders.

Summer School, strange and hot and humid as it was, was one of my favorite times of the year.  The schedule was less packed and we had more time together each day. Some of the intensity of the school year was gone and in some ways we had more freedom in our work.

Going to school in this summer is difficult for everyone, but I appreciated this time to imagine classwork differently and to form new relationships with students outside of their home schools. (And it was awesome when they earned the credits they needed to move forward!)

It was during my time at SPPS that I began teaching online due to covid, and I was grateful that the district's 1-to-1 tech policy had allowed me to take several great technology workshops previously--it helped me see this time as a way to translate and re-imagine our work in a way that (I hope) provided some continuity to my students.

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7th & 8th Grade ELA Humanities Guide - Great River Montessori School

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7th & 8th Grade ELA Humanities Guide - Great River Montessori School

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I'd read some of Maria Montessori's works during my time at UW, out of my own curiosity, and so I was excited when the opportunity to work at Great River School came my way. I spent one full school year and later a semester working with 7th and 8th graders in a combined class in their "Lower Adolescent Humanities" program.

Great River is a charter school, which comes with unique financial and political challenges and complexities, but I was psyched to be in a Montessori environment and figure out what was different.

We started the year with an 8-day "Odyssey," a road trip across part of the country, camping and cooking meals outside at night and exploring various historical and natural sites during the day. It was so intense. So intense. But I bonded with my new students in a way that cannot happen inside a regular school day in a building. This kicked off the year and the community.

The idea of the adolescent level as a community was the defining difference of working in this school. So many features were built around this, in ways that felt more genuine that they might in a traditional school. One reason this happens is because of the underlying belief in Montessori that children are capable beings--that underlying belief changes how a school operates, how it trusts the kids, and what everyone thinks about teens and preteens.

This is not to say that all of the adults had the exact same ideas about everything, but there was an underlying appreciation of adolescents, their phase of life, their wonderfulness, that made our conversations different from other educational spaces I have worked in. (And a lot of things were more interesting and fun!)

Due to life practicalities I wasn't able to continue working in this environment, but I remain inspired and influenced by it and have continued my learning about the Montessori ethos, including attending two Montessori for Social Justice conferences.

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7th, 8th and 9th Grade ELA - St. Paul American School Hanoi

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7th, 8th and 9th Grade ELA - St. Paul American School Hanoi

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Somehow during the locked-down world of the pandemic I was able to take my first leap into the world of international teaching! A big move in so many ways--another country, a smaller school, privately owned, no big district overseeing everything, new ways of working.

My first year I taught mostly 8th graders and one section of 7th grade. I was happy to be with my beloved middle school demographic. We spent almost the entire year online, but my previous experience had me feeling prepared and ready for this challenge. When we returned to school in person in April, I was able to experience the other direction of translating the classroom community-- from online back to in-person-- something I'd been wondering about for so many months! The pandemic is awful, of course, but I am grateful for the many ways these shifts in teaching pushed my pedagogical thinking.

In my second year in Hanoi I am working with 9th graders. I was a bit nervous about leaving middle school, because middle schoolers are the best, but I was very excited to get to loop with my former 8th graders, something I've never done. (We also welcomed abut thirty new students into our fold.)

I am taking this opportunity to attempt the "180 Days" framework proposed by Penny Kittle and Kelly Gallagher and also to mindfully change our classwork in ways that make it feel more "high school" to honor the growth the students are making right now. I think it is going to be a great year.

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6th Grade Humanities & Elective Teacher - International School of Beijing

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6th Grade Humanities & Elective Teacher - International School of Beijing

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6th grade Humanities is a combined ELA and social studies course, including reading and writing workshops, book clubs, and investigations of early humans and civilizations.

I also have the pleasure of designing two elective courses, one on zine-making and one on different forms of storytelling.

I am also continuing to explore and develop my work with the Modern Classrooms Project.

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8th Grade Humanities & Elective Teacher - International School of Beijing

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8th Grade Humanities & Elective Teacher - International School of Beijing

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8th Grade Humanities

Paper Crafts

Public Speaking and Debate

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High School English Teacher - International School of Beijing

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High School English Teacher - International School of Beijing

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English 9

English 10

Mass Media and Journalism/ISB Pathways