Teacher Profile: Karen Moreno

Albert Dai, Campus Reporter

Mrs. Moreno, who has been at Kent since 1997, has taught English for 24 years. In addition, she serves as the advisor to the Yearbook, works on the Academic Committee, assists students with English writing in the ARC, and helps time Girls Varsity Field Hockey games.

 In her years at Kent, Mrs. Moreno has taught ESL (English as a Second Language), English 1, and several English 4 electives, including Personal Essays, Abolitionist Literature, U.S. Nobel Prize Laureates in Literature, and Russian Short Stories. To Mrs. Moreno, the hardest aspect of teaching is focusing her comments on what she wants her students to learn. “I wish I had more time to meet individually with students and go over their writing,” Mrs. Moreno shared. Looking back on her past decades as a teacher, Mrs. Moreno concludes that “teaching is rewarding because I work with students who want to learn and can teach me something new.”

When designing the curriculum, Mrs. Moreno aims to find a balance between the classics and other more contemporary works. For instance, she includes poems and short stories that she is fond of in her English classes aside from teaching core curriculum readings. Mrs. Moreno is impressed by the power of poetry  from writers like Emily Dickinson, who can “feel physically as if the top of [her] head were taken off,”  as it distills a lot of big ideas into a compact structure. Additionally, Mrs. Moreno takes into consideration the length of the work they read in class, favoring shorter work because longer work can be hard to fit into the schedule. 

Aside from being a teacher, Mrs. Moreno is also a Kent parent. Her son graduated from Kent in 2002 and attended Wesleyan College. Recalling that her goal for him at Kent was to become a better writer, she is very proud that he now teaches ESL in middle school.