I’m a long-time secondary school teacher, and I take the burden of teaching writing to your teens off of your shoulders.
Since I launched my online writing program, I've worked with hundreds of teens in the US, Australia, and Canada, and with children of American families working around the world.
Not only that, but in 2014, Writing Rockstars was awarded a Blue Ribbon Award for Favorite College/College Prep Resource by The Old Homeschool Magazine, a top resource publication for homeschooling families.
My teaching career began way back in 1987 when I graduated from college and went to Japan to teach English conversation for two years. Experiencing a culture that was so different from my own widened my perspective and ability to appreciate people that weren’t like me.
But I had a lot of travel experience before I ever went to Japan. As a first-generation Greek-American, my parents took my brother and me back to Greece to visit relatives when I was as young as six years old. Yes, my childhood was a version of “My Big Fat Greek Wedding,” even though I grew up in Richmond, VA.
My academically ambitious immigrant parents pushed us hard, and I ended up doing my undergraduate degree at Duke University. (Go Blue Devils!) Eventually I went back to school for a Master in Teaching at American University in Washington, D.C., and my teaching career started in earnest from there.
I loved the direct interaction with my students and the group dynamic of classroom teaching. But after about 10 years in the classroom, I was burned out.
If you live in the US and have had some experience with public schooling here, you know what it’s often like. Low teacher pay, large classroom sizes, too much content to cover, little to no support on what to do for special needs kids, administrators who decide to assign you 3 to 4 different courses to teach only a few weeks before the school year begins -- you name it.
After a decade working under those conditions, I’d had enough. But I wasn’t ready to give up on teaching.
So, what’s the answer?
It was time to give online teaching a try! It’s been an experiment with a huge learning curve, but so far, so good.
I want to figure out a way to make teaching a more reasonable profession in terms of pay and job conditions.
Online teaching eliminates all the drawbacks of our classroom teaching system. At the moment it also eliminates the creative discussion and learning that takes place in the live group dynamic, but that doesn’t mean a solution to that can’t or won’t be found.
I’m working on it!
As the Writing Rockstars name suggests, I teach writing skills only. There’s nothing wrong with knowing lots of facts, but it’s the skills you learn that carry you through life.
And writing’s a big one.
It’s also a subject that’s hard to teach objectively, unless you’ve spent hundreds of hours doing so.
I needed writing skills instruction before I went to college, and I didn’t get it. I got great grades in public high school and got accepted to the college of my choice. I was so excited!!
But I had a problem when I went to college. My grades were low Bs and Cs! I went from being a straight A high school kid near the top of my class to a mediocre college student.
You know why?
I didn’t know how to write a paper! High school didn’t prepare me. I kept getting bad grades on my papers, and it took me four years to figure out why. It wasn’t that I wasn’t smart enough, I simply didn’t know how to do it correctly.
There are a lot of kids out there who experience the same thing.
In Writing Rockstars’ online writing programs, a professional teacher takes charge of the ENTIRE teaching process.
Your child gets direct individual feedback on every assignment and answers to all their questions from their teacher. This allows the teacher to get to know your kid as a writer and support them to develop their confidence and skills during their time together online.
If you’re going to teach something right, you have to take responsibility for the whole teaching process. Content delivery is only one part of that process. The most important part is the individual feedback and guidance kids receive from their professional teacher.
That's what we offer.
It’s hard to do teach a subject well if you don’t have much prior experience with it, particularly with a subject like writing.
I handle your teens’ writing instruction, and I handle it well.
Our worldview is neutral. I welcome students from all backgrounds. In my online writing programs, students can write about their topics of choice, as long as they’re age appropriate and socially acceptable.
Please click to visit the How Our System Works page to learn exactly how Writing Rockstars' online teaching process works and how you can observe your kids' progress as they work through their course.
Thanks for stopping by! If you have any questions, send a message from the Contact page on the website's main navigation bar or call 732-546-2106.
Have a great day,
Lily :)
