Everything is a metaphor.
Storytelling weaves it into meaning.
Nonprofit Storytelling
I had the privilege of meeting and interviewing many students, teachers, volunteers and staff members throughout my time at education nonprofit Citizen Schools. Scroll through below to read some of my favorite stories.
VidLab: Producing a professional music video with 6th graders
“Do you know what dubstep is Joanne? We want to do a dance to dubstep” said Jeremiah, one of my 6th grade students in my video production apprenticeship called VidLab at Orchard Gardens, a K-8 school in Roxbury, MA.
A frozen banana is rocket science!
Adam Barriga’s story first caught our attention back in 2009, when he was a 6th grader in Dave Mantus’ apprenticeship It Is Rocket Science. Ten years later, Adam, now a Mechanical Engineering major, still remembers Dr. Mantus’ crazy experiments, especially his “Astronaut Ice Cream” using liquid nitrogen.
How Catalyst helped South Bronx, NYC Science Teacher Sherry Tom get students back into (virtual) science class
While remote learning isn’t working well for most students, it’s working wonders for some, which shows that grades can improve dramatically with a shift to project-based learning contextualized as potential solutions to real world problems.
Teaching beyond barriers: Google continues their commitment
When Google closed its offices due to COVID-19 a week before NYC public schools did, our Google Citizen Teachers didn’t hesitate to think of ways to continue apprenticeships virtually. “It wasn’t an option to not make this work. This is a commitment we made to students and we don’t want to let them down,” says Jackie Zopf, Music Operations Program Manager, YouTube.
Journalism & Papers
Accompanied by my writing and analytical skills, my interests, however fleeting, know no limits. Below are some of my favorite journalism stories and papers I’ve written to discover and explore a wide range of topics from religion to histories of sexual cultures.
Church & State: Getting Back Together for Education?
Don Duncan sits with ease, a kind smile wrinkling his gentle face framed in golden hair. He sets his tea down on a charming mess of sheet music, eyebrows suddenly furrowing as he recounts the catalyzing incident that made him resign as a trumpet professor at Wichita State University in Kansas.
Korean by Birth, Jewish by Choice
“The Torah is truly the most valuable thing I ever found in my life,” says Jung-Eun Jeong, a 43-year-old stay at home wife. She leads a Korean Messianic Jewish study group every Saturday afternoon at her apartment in Fort Lee, New Jersey. One of the newer members, Mi-Young Jang, age 35, picks at the bits and pieces of beef and vegetable dumplings scattered on the paper plates.
Sign Language
“Go home kimchi” scrawled on newspaper wrapped around a rock that shattered his store window was one of the first greetings Andy Nam, 74, received when he first opened Grand Furniture on Broad Ave., Palisades Park, in 1989. After moving from New York City for Closter, New Jersey’s better neighborhoods and schools for his two kids, he thought his new largely white neighborhood could be a new market for his business. “You see how my sign doesn’t have any Korean on it? It’s just Grand Furniture. I knew if they saw any Korean, they wouldn’t come in.”
My Country, Right or Wrong. My Children, Right or Wrong.
Imagine that there are two children drowning, one of whom is your own, and that you can only save one. The moral question is of course, who to save; yet the answer is so very clear—you save your own. In Judgment at Nuremberg (1961) and Copenhagen (2002), the highly regarded judge Ernst Janning and Nobel Prize winning German physicist Werner Heisenberg both more or less claim to have made the same decision when choosing to save their country at the cost of innocent lives.
Humanizing the Enemy through Art
In exploring the theme “Persecution in Europe”, the two films The Hiding Place (1975) and The Pianist (2002) portray the effects of Nazi invasion and occupation of the Netherlands and Poland respectively. Despite this difference in addition to the fact that they were produced 27 years apart, a powerful theme emerges in both films—the notion that art has the power to humanize the enemy.