New Literature Teacher Emily Raymundo's Journey to Athenian

Is it worth driving across the country to teach at Athenian? For Emily Raymundo, the new literature seminar and tenth-grade upper-school literature teacher, it was. This probably sounds crazy, but she has already driven across the United States around 25 times.

Over the summer, Emily drove with her two cats across the country to begin a new chapter at Athenian. “It was seven days of 12 hours of driving a day, by myself, and I drive an electric car. I had to find places to charge my car all across the country, which in some states was hard. People gave me weird looks,” Emily said.

Before arriving at Athenian, Emily taught at Phillips Andover Academy, Dartmouth College, the University of Southern California, and the University of Manchester in England. After traveling quite a bit, the change wasn’t that significant for her. “I don't miss Boston at all. I love California. I love the weather and the people are more relaxed and mostly the food is way better.” Emily said. “Yeah, I love the food.”

Why did Emily choose to teach literature and humanities? She said, “ I just had really good English teachers my whole life. I've also just loved literature. It was never a conscious choice. It just was, ‘Obviously, I'm going to be a literature teacher.’ Emily majored in creative writing and went to an art school. “I really didn't get along with my teacher, and she played favorites, and I was not a favorite. I actually think that made me want to be a teacher because I wanted to right the wrongs and treat my students differently than I felt she had treated me.”

In addition to her passion for teaching, Emily loves knitting, and of course, hanging out with her well-traveled cats. One difference between California and Boston is the opportunity to wear the knitwear that Emily makes herself, as the winters there are notoriously colder than in Danville.

Her love for teaching led Emily to join Athenian’s community. She said “I really liked that more experiential approach to education.” From her first few weeks here, she has noticed how everyone is nice and engaged, and people can sit down anywhere at lunch and be able to talk to anyone.

Nico Vargas, a junior in Emily’s fall semester seminar Immigrant Experiences, said one of Emily’s best qualities is her inclusiveness. “Whenever you answer a question, she’s fully focused. Whenever you raise your hand, you have her full attention. She makes you feel heard, and if you say something, she elaborates on your point and then tries to bring in the whole class as well,” Nico said.

Emily’s passion for inclusivity goes far beyond teaching, as she is also Co-Affinity Leader of the Mixed-Race Affinity Space alongside literature teacher and humanities department chair Kimiko Sera-Tacorda. Kimiko was involved in the hiring process and said, “I just love her combination of honesty and kindness. I just think that that's really important in an affinity space. She’s also very student-centered. And I just feel like it's really about, ‘How do we support the students’. She seems really excited. I'm going to be drawing from her excitement this year.”

Emily’s approach to teaching is not black and white. “I think that it's okay to not know. It's okay to have questions and to be in the gray area. I think we always want to find a solution to say it's definitely this thing or this thing. But I'm always pushing my students to ask, what if it's both? Right? And what do we do with that, you know?” she said.

Literature, as a lens that can be used to see the world in different ways, is something Emily embraces. She said, “Literature teaches us to be unsure of the future. It lets us have doubts or shows us that failure is okay. It doesn't judge you, and there's no right answer. I think that in this day and age of always wanting the right answer, always wanting to be the most effective, the best, it's actually really important to sit with something that's like, no, I'm not going to tell you you're right.”