Meet...Katherine Schulten

Getting a little bit educational here but it's important. Katherine Schulten  is awesome: lives in New York, works for the New York Times and has an amazing career with (insert gasp here) an English degree.  

Katherine Schulten Senior Producer,
 New York Times
 Learning Network

Name

Katherine Schulten

Current company of employment, position and how long you’ve been there
New York Times, Editor of the Learning Network blog, a blog for teaching and learning with The New York Times

Do you think you may work in another industry or job?
I’ll probably always work in education, but I may well have a different job or position in the future within that industry.

Where did you attend university or college and what did you study
Boston College. I was an English major. Later I got a Masters from Teachers College at Columbia U. in teaching secondary English, and in 1995 I had a year-long fellowship to attend the Columbia School of Journalism.

Hobbies and interests
I love to read, mostly fiction, and have since I was a little girl. That’s my main hobby. I also love to dance, hike, cross-country ski, make inept handicrafts and wander around NYC with my friends and family.

Do you serve on any committees or participate in any other activities to benefit your community?
Over the years I’ve served on many education committees and done a variety of kinds of volunteer work. Right now I mostly try to be an active parent volunteer at my twin children’s two different high schools.

How do your aspirations now differ from those you had your senior year of high school?
I would never have phrased it this way to myself then, but “literacy” is the obvious through-line of my life. I was always an avid reader and writer, an English major in college, an English teacher for 10 years, then a literacy consultant, and now a Blog Mistress for a blog about, essentially, literacy. But in h.s. I had no idea what I’d end up doing—I just hoped it could be literature-related, because that was always what I was passionate about.

What’s the story behind your love for creative writing?

I’ve been writing all my life. I read “Harriet the Spy” for the first time when I was 8, and she’s been my lifelong heroine. Because of her I started taking notes in a “spy notebook” and also started scheming to live in NYC—where I moved after college in 1984. In 1976, when I was in 9th grade, I started writing down what I do every day, and I’ve never stopped—I have a complete record of what I’ve done every single day since then, which comes in handy when arguing with my husband of 17 years about the date on which such-and-such took place. I write to remember and to make myself pay attention. Of course, I also write all day for work, but that’s different than the writing I do for myself.

When working as a freelance writer did you ever feel concerned about job security and what means did you use to generate work for yourself?

I was a lucky freelance writer because what I wrote was content for schools, and there seems to be an endless need out there for that; if anything, in the ten years I did it (while my children were little and while I was also working in schools as a literacy consultant 2 or 3 days a week), I had too much work. It would have been much different if what I was trying to sell was, say, lifestyle articles to magazines: that’s a crowded field. But I’m endlessly interested in how to teach things, in how people learn, and in how to connect school content to “the real world,” so, to me, writing about curriculum has always been just as creative as any other kind of writing. So I would say that finding one’s niche, whatever that is, is really important. My friend David Wondrich, for instance, is an internationally known writer who makes his living exclusively writing about cocktails and “the cultural history of drinking”—something that deeply interests him and that he’s spent years and years becoming an expert on.

What are your new goals now that the NY Times Learning Network has become a well-known hub for students, parents and teachers all over the world?

I love that you’re characterizing it as a “hub.” Yes, I love the Learning Network; I think of it jokingly to myself as my third child, and I have all kinds of hopes and dreams for it. We’re a teeny, tiny staff—just me, full-time, and Holly Epstein Ojalvo, part-time, and some freelancers—so one of my main goals is always to get us more resources. I’m also very interested in making as many collaborations with outside educational organizations, teachers, schools, and students as possible. I’m constantly inspired by others’ ideas for teaching and learning, and always wanting those varied voices on our site. Because our mission is, fundamentally, to promote the NYT for classrooms, we always have to make sure whatever we publish does that in some way—but, luckily, you can find stories about everything under the sun in The Times, so it’s never hard.