About
I'm an American teacher living in Shanghai, where I teach IB English B and Japanese Ab Initio at Shanghai Qibao Dwight High School and lead the English B department.
I got here by way of Japan. I studied Japanese at Tufts, spent a year at Kanazawa University, and then three years on Sado Island with the JET Programme, teaching across six schools and doing enough translation and interpretation on the side — a triathlon, a music festival, the island's English tourism guide — to learn what it feels like to be responsible for somebody else's words. I've been in China since 2013: first teaching, then running an international primary department of 21 teachers, then training new teachers arriving in the country, and now IB.
Somewhere along the way I started building things. It began with small fixes — a grading program that replaced five documents, a feedback tool that spread to three campuses — and turned into a habit. These days that means local transcription apps, text-to-speech studios, vocabulary quiz tools, and classroom units built like simulations and games. I sit on my school's AI working group, helped draft our AI policy, run professional development for colleagues on using AI well, and I'm finishing an MA in Education with a concentration in AI in Education.
The connecting thread, if there is one, is that I want the hard parts of learning a language to feel possible, and the tedious parts of teaching it to disappear.