ACCOMPLISHMENTS & ACCOLADES
ENGLISH & ELECTIVES TEACHER/MENTOR
Margaret has three-plus years of teaching experience, which built upon her previous tutoring experience. She worked as a teacher/mentor at Fusion Academy, a private school with a one-to-one teaching model, in Fairfield, CT. There, she customized, designed, and taught lesson plans to meet course mastery that aligned with CT Core Standards to a diverse group of students at the middle school, college prep, and honors levels in English, health, psychology, art, wellness, humanities, and creative writing. Outside of the classroom, she spearheaded a number of campus publications (such as yearbook and literary arts magazine), supported and mentored handfuls of students through the college essay process (all of whom got accepted into their desired schools), and served as a peer mentor to help onboard new teachers.
In her second year at Fusion, Margaret won the EPIC! Award for Excellence as well as the EPIC! Award (for nomination across all four award categories).
UNDERGRADUATE WRITING TUTOR
Through UVM’s Undergraduate Writing Center, Margaret became a Certified Master Level Tutor via the CRLA International Tutor Training Program. Between her English major and tutoring prep, she's taken tutoring and writing center methodology courses as well as sentence style courses and countless advances creative writing workshops. Additionally, she has many hours of tutoring under her belt.
Through collaborative conversation, she has worked with both native and non-native English speaking students of all ages, background, learning abilities, and disciplines; she especially likes working with students who are multilingual. During her time tutoring, she wrote an experience-based essay, which explores tutoring to mediate and re-contextualize language when working with ESL students.
As a tutor, Margaret is both a collaborator and a leader, a learner and an instructor, a detail-oriented editor and a mindful close reader. Giving and receiving feedback professionally and in a personable manner comes natural to her. Margaret is also very in-tune with detecting learning and conflict styles. Moreover, she is an expert at asking the right questions and is intimately familiar with the writing process from all angles.
SYMPOSIUM PRESENTER
At the inaugural UVM English Department Symposium, Margaret was invited to present her essay “Unmasking Silence in Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn” on the Literary Studies Panel. Her essay analyzes the function of the silences in Mark Twain’s novel, specifically examining how the silences––marked by grammar/syntax (in other words, pauses induced by punctuation which mark moments of racism), diction inclusion or exclusion (of racist slurs), absence of action, and abrupt endings of chapters following a climax of racist thought or action––function to simultaneously cover up and amplify the racism in the text. Not only does this essay explore how Twain used words, or lack thereof, to comment on racism, but it discusses how Huck’s moral development is a reflection of America’s moral development in regards to racism.
To build the argument of this paper, the following essays are brought into conversation with one another: “This Amazing, Troubling Book” by Toni Morrison, "Mr. Eliot, Mr. Trilling, and Huckleberry Finn” by Leo Marx, and “Deadpan Huck” by Sacvan Bercovitch.
ALLBEE AWARD WINNER
Margaret is also the recipient of UVM’s 2014-2015 Allbee Award for Excellence in Composition in ENGS 005 for her essay “The Seed of Monstrosity”. The paper is built on close-readings from three of the most popular monster novels: Dracula, Frankenstein; or The Modern Prometheus, and Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. The reception of her paper by the judges was as follows:
"[The] essay articulates a well-argued thesis that teases out multiple layers of the meaning of ‘passion’ as they intersect with the monster as a conceptual figure within Victorian literary texts. The judges were impressed with the sophistication of her deft weaving of multiple texts in her analysis, which still manages to differentiate each text’s contribution to the whole. The logic of the essay directs the reader to follow the complex movement of her mind.”
Margaret's essay engages with Jeffrey Jerome Cohen’s essay “Monster Culture (Seven Theses)" and adds to the conversation surrounding the monster as a cultural figure; such an exploration gives insight not only into the concept and paradox of monstrosity, but also into how we perceive ourselves, our actions, and our desires.