Carla: Merrillville tutor

Certified Tutor

I received a Bachelor's degree in English with a secondary field (minor) in French at Harvard College. For my honors creative thesis in poetry, I wrote 52 original poems, centered on themes of transit, transience, nature, and urban life (particularly how these categories intersect). I also created and taught humanities courses to high school and middle school students through the Educational Studies Program at Harvard. Through this group, I co-founded ESProut, a program focused on bringing free after-school classes to under-resourced schools in the greater Somerville area, through which I taught French and poetry. Following graduation, I spent the school-year working as an English language teaching assistant at a high school in Bordeaux, France where I created lessons focusing on grammar, vocabulary, idiomatic speech, and culture. This past year, I received my master's in English at the University of Cambridge, writing a dissertation on trans-Atlantic/trans-cultural poetry with a focus on Walt Whitman, T.S. Eliot, and Jules Laforgue. Many summers have found me working as a residential assistant for Johns Hopkins University Center for Talented Youth, where I often would run the ever popular Seuss & Silverstein appreciation session. My ultimate goal is to become a high school English teacher and I am interested in becoming involved in educational policy at the national level later on in my life. Teaching is a joy that has always rivaled the happiness I receive from reading a great poem or communicating in another language. English and French literature are the two great passions of my life, and it is when I'm teaching that I feel most like I am doing meaningful and rewarding work. When I'm not reading poetry or practicing my French, I like boogie-boarding (a recently acquired skill), hiking, baking (often French desserts), and knitting.