About the Founder
Hello. I’m Ellen Finnigan, founder of Teach to the Text and creator of The 12-Paper Plunge. I received my B.A. in English from Boston College and worked at two tech start-ups on the East Coast before heading out West to pursue my M.F.A. in Creative Writing at the University of Montana, where I won the 2008 Merriam-Frontier Award for distinguished achievement in writing.
I never set out to become a teacher but fell in love with it after landing my first teaching job at St. John Bosco, a hybrid school in Cumming, Georgia. After that I taught for nine years in the high school English and Literature department at Kolbe Academy Online, a writing-intensive classical school. I graded over 3,000 high school essays before starting Teach to the Text in 2023!
Two things have really shaped my approach to teaching writing: Before I was a writing teacher, I was a writing coach; before I was a writing coach, I was a writer. My work has appeared in a variety of venues, both online and in print. In my twenties, I wrote a political column for The Journal Newspapers in Washington D.C., and my essays were published frequently for about 15 years on LewRockwell.com. My writing has appeared in a few literary magazines, in an anthology published by Oxford University Press, and most recently in my local paper The Estes Park Trail-Gazette. It has also been mentioned in Vanity Fair and in The New York Post.
I love to help my students to develop their powers of observation and concentration, to read slowly and think clearly. I want to help them appreciate the Great Conversation so they can one day contribute to it. I am practicing Catholic, and I believe that truly “the pen is mightier than the sword.”
Secular or religious?
Truth matters! Truth is best pursued in conversation with others and with the past. At Teach to the Text, we pursue truth together, one text at a time.
Literature classes and unit studies deal with moral, spiritual, and philosophical questions from a Christian perspective, drawing on the 2,000-year-old intellectual tradition of the Catholic Church to articulate and present that perspective. Religious content is very general and should be acceptable to any Christian, whether Catholic, Orthodox, or Protestant.
Writing courses here are mostly secular.
Non-believers are welcome, as long as they can accept that Teach to the Text classrooms are “safe spaces” for Christians where the Christian worldview is assumed as the “norm”. (As for disagreements among denominations, we currently have no theology classes, so these issues rarely, if ever, come up.)
A Poem for You
The Roman poet Juvenal once wrote about charlatans in education.
Here is Ms. Finnigan’s adaptation of his poem:
"Devoid of knowledge, as of worth, they thrust,
In every nook, some philanthropic bust;
For he, among them, counts himself most wise,
Who most old sages of the sculptor buys;
Sets most true Zenos, or Cleanthes’ heads,
To guard the volumes which he — never reads!
Trust not to outward show..."
Especially when they put a bust in their logo. 😉
