Hi, I’m Rosemary, and I’m thrilled to be Response’s new Community Education Coordinator. I earned my B.S. from Northwestern last year, and while I am new to the experience of teaching full time, I have had a wide range of teaching experiences. I’ve worked as anyone from substitute to farm educator, and anywhere from synagogues to the wilderness. (I’m from the Pacific Northwest, and I love all things nature.) I can't wait to bring my eclectic mix of experience to this job, where I will engage a diverse array of students in a range of environments.

One skill that I am especially excited to use in my work at Response (and continue honing while I work here) is my ability to engage young adults and get them invested in their learning. Getting middle and high schoolers to care about something they weren’t interested in before you walked into their classroom is a delicate art. Some of my proudest engagement achievements involve getting 5th graders hyped about learning Hebrew (via personal goal-setting activities) and helping a 7th grade audience find hope and motivation amidst environmental destruction.

One of the most crucial parts of helping students care about what you’re teaching is showing students that you care about them. I look forward to asking students for their expertise before I offer my own, highlighting and responding to related pieces of content that they are more interested in, and inviting them to participate in ways that make them feel most comfortable. I am also a fan of using humor – depending, of course, on the energy profile of the room. If I can manage to get a laugh out of a room full of groggy Monday morning high schoolers, that is a bucket-list level achievement!

Connecting with students is one of the most important (and delightful!) aspects of student engagement, but can also be one of the most challenging, especially within a limited amount of time. When I was a substitute teacher in District 65, I needed to convince students that I was not only caring and trustworthy, but also a serious boundary-holder they should listen to – and, most importantly, not a child who just decided to pretend to be a teacher one day (I look young), all in the course of a few hours.

At Response, I will often be meeting new students and teaching them for an hour or less at a time. I have taught hour-long workshops at Institute for Soil and Soul (a Jewish regenerative agriculture farm), and I found ways to connect with the students within that timeframe, but that subject matter is not as sensitive as sexual health topics can be. All my previous experience broaching challenging subjects as an educator (like mental health, the Holocaust, climate change, etc.), has been with students I’ve already worked with for a few lessons and had time to build relationships with. I am eager to level up to this challenge and use my engagement skills to help students feel psychologically safe and cared for in a brief period of time, all while discussing adolescent development.

This time-resource trade-off is powerful: while it would be great to have more time to build relationships with students, it is wonderful to have the time that other teachers lack to dive deep into studying comprehensive sexual education. I’ve been inspired by the educational partnerships Response for Teens has with other non-profits, and by my coworkers’ ability to stay up to date with current research on everything from the “manosphere” to youth mental health trends to all-body-inclusive sex ed.

I also think it can be helpful for students to have someone presenting about these topics who is outside of their normal routine. There is freedom in anonymity. The students could be anyone, and I could be anyone! Who knows, maybe I will remake myself every few months or so and present myself with a completely different style. (Let me know if you have any fun ideas!) But whoever I come into the room as, I’m looking forward to the exciting challenge of building safety, connection, and engagement wherever I go.