Emma Rice

Where do you attend school and what activities are you involved in?

I am a rising junior at Kenyon College, where I am majoring in English and minoring in Spanish. In addition, I am also earning a certification in teaching ELA to middle and high schoolers from Capital University as part of a partnership program with Kenyon. I am on the academic merit list and honor roll at both colleges.

I also graduated with honors from Bishop Ireton High School in 2022. There, I was a member of the National Honor Society and the Spanish Honor Society, as well as the editor-in-chief of the student-run literary magazine, Cambridge Road, and president of the National English Honor Society.

What have your teaching opportunities been outside of Fairfax Collegiate?

On the weekends, I volunteer in the local Ohio community with ¡Hola! Tutoring, work as a tutor at the Kenyon Writing & Skills Center, and write and edit for the student-run newspaper, the Kenyon Collegian. I just completed the first portion of my student teaching in the fall 2023 semester when I taught freshman English at Mount Vernon High School in Ohio.

In the past, I have taught ESL at the Washington English Center, volunteered in a fifth grade classroom at Wiggins St. Elementary School, taught technical theatre at the Bishop Ireton Summer Theatre Camp, and was an SAT/ACT Prep Class Teaching Assistant with Capital Educators.

What sort of experience have you had in the subject you’ll be teaching this summer?

I have taken numerous English courses, which include

• Intro to English: Monstrous Forms
• Texting: Reading Like an English Major
• Restoration and Early 18th-Century Literature
• Theories and Practices of Life-Writing
• Writing Center Colloquium

I am also a writing tutor, an editor at the school newspaper, and I did an internship at a children's book publishing company.

What excites you about teaching and working with students?

I am so excited to teach and work with young students! I love writing, and I cannot wait to instill a similar love in my students. To cite my own college essay (that got me into the Writer's College), "Stories, plots, and characters have run through my head since I was five years old... I’ve turned to stories ever since I could breathe, before I knew what stories or breathing really were. It seems only right that my future should orient around sharing the characters who soar in my imagination." As evidenced by this fragment, I have always loved stories, whether they were fictional or true. In middle and high school, I found writing to be an escape, a refuge, and a way of processing the world around me. I want to encourage the same love of reading and writing in my students, teaching them the lessons I wanted to know when I was sixteen and puzzling over my college essay, fictional stories, and thesis statements.

Outside of work, what are some hobbies you enjoy?

I love making and studying art, exploring libraries and bookstores, and traveling (the more hiking trails, the better). I also love working as an usher at Signature Theatre in the evenings, where I get to see so many beautiful shows. I'm going to be studying abroad at the University of Exeter in the south of England next year! There, I'm hoping to take more literature classes, see performances in London, and hike the English countryside.