My name is Rachel Levy. If you know me from twitter, you might think I go by Rachel Anne, but I don't often--using my middle name was all I could do to distinguish myself from the thousands of Rachel Levys and still use my name as my handle.
I am a writer, a teacher, and a parent. I also like to read, cook, exercise, and travel. I speak French and Spanish. I grew up in Washington, DC. Not the part of DC that's in Gaithersburg or Centreville (not that there's anything wrong with that), but in the part of DC that has no voting rights in Congress. After high school, I went to a liberal arts college where I studied French and history, though I spent a year of that attending a university in southern France. I had always written but I became hooked on it my senior year when for my senior project I translated a series of short stories from French to English.
After graduating, I spent two years in New York City. The first year I worked as a paralegal and learned that while I might like to be a law professor, I did not want to be a lawyer and hence did not want to go to law school. Sometimes, though, I catch myself thinking I should have gone to law school. I'm always thinking I should have done things I haven't done.
My second year in New York, I took on a part-time teaching job with a private school in my borough of residence (and paternal ancestral homeland), Brooklyn. Then, I got hooked on teaching and eventually returned to DC to live, work, attend grad school, and teach. I wanted to be an English teacher but didn't have the prerequisites, so I became licensed in social studies and as a back-up, in ESL. Then, I got hooked on working with ELL students and their families.
I had been planning to go to Turkey to teach English but then I met my (future) husband and I ended up in the metropolis of Charlottesville, Virginia, so my guy could get a PhD. I taught there and then we moved to Oakland, California, where I decided to (mostly) take a break from the teaching and to work on the writing. After two years in sunny Cali, we moved back to Central Virginia and settled in the small town where my husband is a college professor.
In all, I have about ten years of teaching experience. I've taught all ages--from preschoolers to adults (but mostly secondary students) and in many settings--public and private schools as well as for non-profits. I write all kinds of stuff but decided that writing about education would be more practical than writing poetry. Then, I got hooked on writing about education, but found that doing so wasn't any more practical.
Did I mention yet that I have three children? They are the smartest, most curious, most beautiful children in the world. But they do have their flaws, like they must be fed, everyday, sometimes multiple times. And they have bad grammar and make messes and crude jokes. Anyway, by now I have weaned them off of drinking their own bathwater, and they are old enough to operate a remote control and to ask me to "please stop that" when I sing or dance. In Fall 2012, I returned to teaching (part-time) while still trying to write and making sure our children didn't wreck the furniture. In Fall 2014, I started a PhD program and graduate assistantship at Virginia Commonwealth University in Educational Leadership and Policy. I finished in August 2018 and went back to teaching high school (Government :) in the fall of 2019.
If you've gotten this far, I thank you for your interest in my work.
If you wish to access my blogs and publications, go to this page.
If you wish to learn more about my teaching experience, go here.
If you think you might like to ask me about reading, writing, editing, teaching, or speaking about something, go here.