NAIS - Member Voices: A Q&A with Kori Rimany

Kori Rimany
English Teacher
The Frederick Gunn School
Washington, Connecticut

Did you always plan to be a teacher?

Certainly not. I attended The Frederick Gunn School (CT) as a student for four years and then went on to Connecticut College to study English, math, and gender studies. As I was approaching the end of my senior year of college, I still had no idea what I wanted to do. Then my calculus teacher from high school sent me a message—and I’m certain she was joking or half-joking—that said, “Hey, are you ready to come back and teach math yet?” I was anxious about being able to pay my student loans, and I was feeling disconnected to every job interview I went on. So I responded, “Yes, I actually think I am.”

I ended up applying for both the math and English positions, and now I am in my fifth year as an English teacher. But for the first two years, I was figuring out if this was what I wanted to dedicate my life to. I wish I could say that the moment I stepped into the classroom, that first class I taught, I knew teaching was what I wanted to do for the rest of my life. That first year was hard, and I doubted myself at every turn. I was figuring out, What am I doing? Am I any good at this? What is my purpose here as an educator? Those are questions I still ask myself on occasion, but now I feel very strongly that teaching is what I want to do.

What are some lessons you’ve learned?

For my first two years, I thought of teaching as a performance. I felt like I needed to set my emotions aside, put a smile on my face, and pretend like everything is super-great and wonderful. It’s exhausting to do that all day, every day. Along the way, colleagues told me, “You have to be a real human, and there’s nothing wrong with your students seeing you as a real human. There’s strength in vulnerability.”

Then I lost my grandfather to COVID-19, and the next day I was on Zoom thinking, “I can’t do this.” I don’t even remember what we were talking about in AP Language, but my eyes glazed over, and I couldn’t respond to my students. I don’t think I even heard what they were saying. And one of them said, “Ms. Rimany, are you OK?” And I said, “No, I’m not OK. I’m so sorry.” We ended class. The next day, they had all made little signs that they held up on Zoom that said, “We love you” and “You’re the best.” That moment helped me understand that when students see a teacher, a role model, who appears to be perfect and has everything figured out, it gives them the idea that adulthood is about perfection. As my colleagues told me, it’s good for students to see a teacher’s humanity.

What are you seeing in your students related to their health and well-being?

This year I have been blown away by my freshmen, their excitement, and their eagerness to be in the classroom and to learn alongside their peers. But with freshmen especially, there are certain gaps. For the first two weeks of school, it was a challenge for them to sit for 40 minutes and listen to their peers, to get all the wiggles and bathroom visits out. My students are motivated and excited to be back in the classroom, but I would say they have more challenges adjusting to the social aspect of being in a classroom and part of that community.

What about your health and well-being as a faculty member?

I really love that at an independent school we can focus so much on the social-emotional health of our students to help them develop these competencies of self-awareness, social awareness, and relationship skills. But it’s almost as if we assume as soon as someone graduates college, they have gotten their degree in social-emotional learning.

It’s not true. We give our students this grace and recognition that they are still figuring it out in a lot of ways, and I think we need to do the same for faculty. Particularly coming out of the pandemic, all of us have something going on in our lives that somebody may know nothing about. And we can’t just pack that away when we step into a classroom.

I was looking at the NAIS Career Center, and the number of job postings is a bit shocking. Of course, there’s going to be turnover, but it’s hard to see your colleagues leave after just one or two or three years—and then especially after 10 or 11 or 12 years. We’re not just each other’s colleagues; we’re each other’s neighbors. That’s what I love about teaching in a boarding school. But when someone leaves, it’s a hole in the community, and there is a sort of grieving process that you go through. I don’t think we talk enough about the impact of that grieving on everyone in the community, adults included.

How can we help support adult well-being?

I think there are lots of little things. When someone does something that’s worth recognizing, recognize it. When someone is clearly having a bad day, ask them if they’re OK or if you can cover a class for them. In the same way that we pay very close attention to our ninth graders and our new students as they’re acclimating to this new community, we also need to pay close attention to our new faculty. Just like new students, they are wondering, Am I part of this? Is this where I belong? Do I fit in?

Has social and political polarization affected your work?

The current political environment offers me a unique opportunity to help my students learn how to navigate what they’re reading, listening to, and watching. My job is not to tell them what to think but to help them learn how to think and learn how to develop their own beliefs, which is perhaps more important now than ever before.

In my AP Language class, we take shorter opinion pieces from The New York Times or The New Yorker—students can bring in anything—and we do a rhetorical analysis. This class is all about understanding a speaker’s purpose and how they achieve that purpose, which is an important skill to have as a citizen in a democracy.

When we put the political conversations I used to fear through the lens of rhetoric and an English class, they’re more approachable. I want my students to be better writers, thinkers, and readers when they leave my class, but I also want them to have the confidence to read a challenging piece or to be able to navigate a hard conversation with someone who has different beliefs than them. They need to have these conversations. But it’s not necessarily an intuitive skill.

Listen to the full interview with Kori Rimany on the NAIS Member Voices podcast. Download it now at iTunes, SoundCloud, TuneIn, Stitcher, or GooglePlay. Rate, review, and subscribe to hear a new episode each month.

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