Experience

I decided to home school my children because they were late bloomers in speech and not yet ready to learn to read in their early primary years. My oldest learned to read at age 8 and my second at age 10. They were at adult reading level within two years of learning to read. Every student learns differently and at a different pace, sometimes proceeding quickly and other times needing more time to internalize a concept. Teaching my kids myself gave me flexibility which is not possible in a classroom setting.

Teaching my oldest to read was easy because he shares my visual learning style, but my second was a very different story. I had been using the Riggs program, but ignoring parts of the multisensory system. This was a very bad idea as my daughter is a kinesthetic learner and leaving out those aspects led to terrible results. I took the Riggs teacher training and changed my implementation which led to success.

Something similar happened with my oldest in math. My husband has a PhD in mathematics and I had a STEM degree. Math had always been easy for us and I thought I could teach it. This was another mistake, so I looked for more effective math programs. I wound up using Math-U-See, which is a multisensory program developed by an engineer. We had tremendous success with it and my children became very good at math with a solid foundation.

For the teen years, my kids transitioned into Santa Monica College, entering between the ages of 13 and 15 depending on maturity level. The two who chose to enter higher education got large scholarships, and I learned much about this process. My oldest disliked college intensely and wound up going into the Marines followed by the trades. My daughter graduated from Moore College of Art and Design in Philadelphia.

When my children were young I started tutoring because some of the teens in my Sunday School class could not read. I invited them privately to study with me over the summer which led to other students being referred to me. Since then I have worked with students here and there, but now that my husband is retired and all our own children have grown up, I want to spend more time helping students to meet their goals and develop confidence.

When I have Spanish speaking students, I weave in connections to Spanish to help them see the linguistic interconnections. Because my kids attended school in Mexico, I also have understanding of the difficulties of adjusting to different educational systems and can help with this as well.

I was born in Switzerland to American parents. We returned to the US when I was almost 3 and we lived in Michigan until I was 8. Next, I lived in Oregon until I was 17 and moved to Vermont to attend the New England Culinary Institute in Montpelier. This led to my job working as the chef at the 3 Mountain Inn in Jamaica, Vermont. My next adventure was a move to Europe where I traveled and found a job as an au pair in Switzerland, after which I moved back to the US and entered Oregon State University where I was able to combine Food Science with my culinary background to work in product development for Reser’s Fine Foods.

I had married in my last year of college and after my husband took a job in Utah, I followed, and from that point we started to have children and I stayed home with them. We moved many more times for his jobs. We took a break to live in Mexico from 2002 to 2003 which allowed the entire family to learn Spanish. I was recently able to return to school to earn a BA in Spanish.

In my years at home, I continued to study and learn new things. I garden, knit, and sew as well as read about finance, international news, economics, history and science. Nothing brings me more joy than learning new things.

Biography

Education

BS Food Science and Technology with Minor in German, Oregon State University 1989

Teacher Training, Riggs Institute 2001

BA Spanish, Oregon State University, 2024