Nice to meet you!

 Hi, I'm Caolan (KEE-lin)! I grew up in Providence, but I lived in Brooklyn, NY, for most of my adult life. I recently moved back to New England to teach Humanities at a tiny private high school in Marlborough, MA. My husband Paul and I have two kids--Jane, who's about to turn 13, and Alice, who just turned 8. Here's a photo of me and my family at Disneyland earlier this month: 

I've been teaching for about 20 years, but this is the first education class I've ever taken! Most of my experience is at the college level; I have an MFA in creative writing and a PhD in English literature, and I taught literature, writing, and gender studies courses during the many years when I was in graduate school and then worked as an adjunct professor after graduation. During the pandemic, I ended up teaching remote second grade at my daughter's public school in Brooklyn (NYC had a very labor-intensive return-to-school plan that required in-person teachers, teachers for the fully remote students, and remote teachers for blended learning students on their remote days) and I was surprised how much I loved it. I started substitute teaching in person and thinking about how I could transition to full-time K-12 teaching. Then in July 2024 I was offered my current job, and my family and I decided to take a big leap and move from NYC to suburban MA in a little less than a month. 

I found out that I really love teaching high school, and now I'm figuring out my next steps--I went to Providence Public Schools from kindergarten through twelfth grade, and I'd love to end up teaching in RI. And although most of my teaching has been in colleges, my thinking about social issues in education has been most powerfully shaped by my experiences as a public school parent and education activist in NYC. And then my current work at an independent school is giving me another set of perspectives! I'm really excited to learn from all of you--there's such a wealth of diverse experiences and perspectives in our class and everyone seems so thoughtful and so dedicated as educators and community members. 

More about me / other photos:

• When I was a kid, I was in A Christmas Carol at Trinity Rep for a few years, and I'm really delighted that my kids now get to do theater camp at Trinity during the summers (they're doing a week of camp right now!). Last year my oldest got to perform in the extremely Rhode Island role of The Big Blue Bug in a parody production of The Tempest (well, sort of a mashup of the Big Blue Bug and Caliban):
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• Things I like to do: writing, reading (I just finished Yesteryear--not sure how I feel!), taking walks in the woods, swimming / being immersed in water, baking and decorating cookies, having fancy cocktails on outdoor patios, singing, going to the movies, making lists of our favorite movies and songs from every year on road trips with my husband, playing Gartic Phone with my family, making my students go outside and write poems while pretending to be Walt Whitman