Teacher Spotlight: Hannah Karmin

For the first new teacher profile in this series, we spoke with Hannah Karmin.

Originally from Los Angeles, Humanities teacher Hannah Karmin moved to the east coast after high school to attend Yale University. This spring, she received her Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from Cornell University. Karmin is excited to be a part of the Sequoyah community this year, as she feels like “there are so many things here that correct a lot of things that were wrong, at least in [her] education.” 

This year, Karmin will be teaching Humanities 1 and 2 to 9th and 10th graders, as well as offering a Z Block on creative writing. Additionally, she is a faculty sponsor of the Gryphon Media Company and has a 9th grade Advisory. In her Humanities 1 course on ancient civilizations, Karmin will be using her training in classics, which involved comparisons of ancient and modern texts, to show students “what it’s like to come up with ideas about something when what you don't know outweighs what you know.” Her Humanities 2A class will be focusing on capitalism through the lenses of literature and history. Along with those courses, in her Creative Writing Z Block, Karmin will be drawing on her experience as a published poet and short story writer; her goal is “for everyone to get published by the end of the year.” 

As a very “text-based” person, she enjoys “anything that people haven’t read before... [anything that] they don't like, then come to like.” Additionally, she hopes to teach people about how writing is just hard work, and not “all about being a genius”; she hopes this will “save them a lot of time and mental torture.” One fun fact about Karmin is that she has a mutt named Ajax. If you see her around campus, go say hi!