Twenty-five years teaching ESL. A master's in linguistics — cognitive grammar, semantics of complementation. A 2001 paper in Chicago Linguistic Society proceedings.
These days I build pedagogical tools with AI, from a kitchen table in Michigan.
For fifteen years I ran a small business in language and cultural training. Then I spent a decade teaching ESL at the college level — Oakland Community, Macomb — writing curriculum, norming exit exams, getting really good at watching a learner's face the moment a grammar point clicked.
The adjunct economy made staying impossible. I moved into tech through technical writing, then worked my way up to a senior PM role at Okta. The linguistics degree got filed away. The teaching career got reframed as "instructional design" on a resume that nobody in tech quite knew what to do with.
On the side, I'd been designing pedagogical apps for years — exercises, puzzles, flows, content. A developer-collaborator was supposed to handle the technical layer. Two years in, he hadn't shipped. I pulled the plug.
My husband bought me a Claude subscription. Two of those apps shipped in ten days. What had been missing was the assembly; the pedagogical work had been ready all along.
From there I kept building. A workout tracker for my husband and his parents. A family history web experience as a gift for my mother's 75th. And a longer-running design for a prosody training tool I've been thinking about since I started teaching.
The work I trained for is the work I'm doing again. The tools just changed.
AI did the typing. The judgment is twenty-five years of doing this for real.
Lightweight, delightful learning.
facetenglish.com ↗Twelve hand-built modules covering vocabulary, rhyme, irregular verbs, gerunds and infinitives, collocations, homophones, tenses, phrasal verbs, syntax, and sentence architecture. Every example, every distractor, every rhyme written by me. The Complements module is, in a sense, my thesis turned into exercises. Installable as a PWA.
A daily puzzle that isn't a Wordle clone.
wordkabob.com ↗Five words climb a skewer. Anchor letters bank as you go, and the final round anagrams them into a word clued in rhyme. Every puzzle hand-constructed under a vicious four-constraint stack. Star-fruit mascot included.
A workout tracker for the people I love.
Real-time sync across three phones — my husband, his mom, his dad-the-coach — with no login. Just a shared family code. Workouts, PRs, streaks, and coach awards. Built because they asked, with love.
A gift for my mother's 75th birthday.
A paper-textured, map-and-timeline web experience that begins as a gift and becomes the family's shared keeping-place. Roughly 89 people across 5–6 generations. Person-relative navigation, custom-styled maps, magic-link auth, photo uploads, edit history, weekly digests. The longest arc I've taken on — seven months, on purpose.
Prosody is the part of language most learning tools quietly skip — stress, intonation, tone, the music of how meaning rides over words. Duolingo doesn't really do it. Most ESL curricula treat it as advanced or optional. And for autistic adults working on prosodic perception, or people with apraxia, or anyone in flat-affect-related social communication work, there's clinical tooling but almost nothing self-directed.
It's the app I've wanted to build for years. It's the tool I kept wishing existed while I was teaching. It's larger than what one person can ship in ten days. The smaller apps are how I'm proving — to myself, to a future collaborator, to a grant panel — that it's doable.
For ESL learners and neurodivergent native speakers.
A self-directed training tool for stress, intonation, and tone. Two underserved audiences with overlapping needs and almost no good consumer tooling between them. The pedagogy is mine; the audio analysis layer is well-served by mature open libraries. Currently mapping the build, looking toward a clinical collaborator and NIH / NSF / IES grant funding (SBIR-friendly).
Small business owner. Classroom teacher. Tech program manager. The job title kept changing; the work — making complex things clear, making learning happen, building systems that scale to humans — never did.
If you're a linguist, ESL educator, SLP, ed-tech researcher, or anyone working at the intersection of language and learning — I'd love to hear what you're working on. I'm reachable directly.