Hey guys! Working in education, I put a lot of time and effort into thinking about how to make complicated things feel clear and important — and it seemed like a waste to spend all of this time for only a few students when I could also put the fruits of this time and effort out into the world for whoever may need them.
Welcome to Education in Context 🙂
More About Me (The Author of This Website)
Hello, I’m Kira (or Ms. Coleman, if you’re one of my students!), the author of this website. One of these days I will put a smiling picture of me on this page so you can look at it and go, “oh cool, she’s smiling and therefore looks trustworthy,” but as of right now I have no recent photos of me that have professional vibes. (I’ll get on that soon, I swear).
I’m sure one of your main questions is “Hello, this seems cool and all, but why should we trust you to know things?” And that’s a valid question!
Here are my credentials for knowing about education (besides just being a serious lifelong nerd):
My Formal Education
I have a B.A. (a Bachelor of Arts) in English and Creative Writing from Fordham University. This is a serious degree that I did a lot of things for! (Note: it is not necessary to have a degree to know about things…. but it can be helpful for getting other people to quickly believe that you know about things (even if you secretly don’t know the things.)) It is also worth mentioning that I officially declared my major four times during undergrad (Physics -> Math -> Visual Arts -> English and Creative Writing), so I have some idea of how a bunch of different departments run.
I also started (and did not finish) a Master’s degree in Structural Engineering (the branch of Civil Engineering that covers how to design buildings and bridges so that they don’t fall down) at the University of Utah. I’m sure some of you are thinking “what, dropping out of grad school is not a credential!” And that’s sort of true: I can’t get an engineering license, but I did take a lot of math and science classes, so I know a lot of math and science even though I dropped out of grad school! (Why on Earth I graduated in English and Creative Writing and then started and dropped out of Engineering grad school is a long story, but the short version is that I thought I could be an engineer to make money and then realized that I just did not want to).
Before all of that college business, I also went to elementary and secondary (middle and high) school! I know, I know, pretty much everybody who went to college did. But, hear me out here: I went to a lot of types of these schools. During my K-12 years I attended private school, public school, online charter school, an online class through a university, and one time my dad taught AP United States History to me and a bunch of my friends in our dining room on Friday evenings for a year (yes, we were all nerds). Which is to say, I have a large basis for comparison as far as how different schools work!
My Work In Education
Beyond going to schools, I’ve also worked at a lot of schools.
I started my work in schools in high school — during the 2016-2017 school year (my senior year of high school!) I worked in the Writing Center at my high school, helping peers write and edit all sorts of papers. I even did my senior project on the writing center, culminating in creating a set of resources for future writing center coaches to use in their sessions.
I worked as a tutor and classroom aid in Bronx public schools during the 2018-2019 school year. This was a wild experience — I learned a lot about educational discrepancies between districts, and what it means to be in an underserved school district.
During the 2021-2022 school year, I worked as a tutor and Homework Center manager at a private school in suburban Utah. I started as a Reading and Writing tutor, but when they found out I knew Math, I ended up tutoring a lot of Math. This experience taught me a lot about the struggles that students have regardless of income and educational access — although money is a big factor in quality of education, it doesn’t automatically make everything make sense!
While I was working on that Engineering Degree (the one that I didn’t finish) during the 2022-2023 school year, I was also working as a tutor in the Math Center at the University of Utah, where I learned a lot about what the common gaps and misunderstandings are in Math education, and how high school math segues into college math.
More recently, I’ve been substitute teaching in public schools in the Salt Lake City School District (during the 2023-2024 school year). This experience has put me in different schools most days, which has helped me to gain understanding of what makes schools run smoothly vs chaotically (often things that are out of the control of the people working at the school, who are almost always working very hard to make things run smoothly).
I’ve also been doing some private tutoring during the 2023-2024 school year, which has given me a chance to reflect in more depth on how to cater teaching and learning objectives to individual students.
And lastly (for now anyways), I’m a 2024 Teach For America corps member, which means I’ll be teaching in a public school in rural Mississippi for at least the 2024-2026 school years, but maybe beyond that. I’m excited to see what this experience teaches me!
In Conclusion
A lot of my time and brain power has been devoted to thinking about school or schools in some capacity since I was approximately three years old, so I have a lot of things to say! Stick around, and we’ll have a good (and nerdy) time. 🙂