Last winter, Charlotte Stabenau, one of the newest additions to the Fieldston English department was not exactly an unfamiliar face \u2013 her mother, Annette Stoller, has been teaching literature here for many years. The Fieldston News sat down with the mother-daughter pair to talk about what it is like to be colleagues and to learn more about them.
\nGrowing up, Ms. Stabenau lived in many different cities with her father and her mother, whom we all know as Ms. Stoller. She was born in New York City, spent two years in Riverdale and ended up in Pelham for a year. Then, Ms. Stabenau\u2019s father \u2013 Ms. Stoller\u2019s husband \u2013 was transferred to work in Frankfurt, Germany. His new job relocated the entire family to Europe for six years. \u201cSo,\u201d Ms. Stoller proudly stated, \u201c[Ms. Stabenau] is really bilingual, and sometimes we speak a little German at home.\u201d
\nAfter those six years in Germany, where Ms. Stoller taught English and Ms. Stabenau went to school, the family returned to Edgemont, New York. \u201cThat\u2019s where my parents have been ever since,\u201d Ms. Stabenau explained, \u201cAnd I, except for stints in Connecticut and Boston for college and graduate school, have been in New York ever since.\u201d
\nOne of the questions on our mind for the dynamic duo was, \u201cWhat inspired you to become teachers?\u201d Ms. Stoller knew that she wanted to be a teacher from the beginning. \u201cMy poor brother, he was three years younger\u2026 we shared a room and when his friends would come to play with him, I would make them sit on one bed and I would sit on the other bed and I would be the teacher.\u201d Before coming to Fieldston, Ms. Stoller taught at Hamilton College, where she was one of the first full-time female faculty members.
\nAlthough both of Ms. Stabenau\u2019s parents were teachers, \u201cit really began for me with a love of literature that grew into a more serious academic interest in college.\u201d Ms. Stabenau noted a profound experience in college where she had to teach a poem to her class. This experience of teaching a poem to others influenced her to enroll in teacher training at Tufts. \u201cI loved working with adolescents and I loved my subject, so the best way to combine the two is to become a high school teacher!\u201d
\nWhen asked about their favorite books, Ms. Stoller immediately answered, \u201cI think we share a love of two books, including Pride and Prejudice (and almost all of Austen\u2019s novels) and George Elliot\u2019s Middle March. I think they are both, may I say, our favorites?\u201d Ms. Stabenau agreed, adding, \u201cI love Nineteenth Century literature and Victorian poetry and romantic poetry. There\u2019s just so much happening at that time intellectually and that\u2019s reflected in the literature of the time and its an endless source of study and conversation.\u201d
\nAs the interview came to a close, we spoke about what it is like for Mrs. Stoller and Ms. Stabenau to be colleagues. \u201cI just think it\u2019s the great fortune that we work together and we\u2019re\u2014I think we\u2019re\u2014as she\u2019s gotten older I think we\u2019ve become\u2014\u201d Ms. Stoller paused, glancing at her daughter, before continuing, \u201cWe\u2019re almost, not quite, friends.\u201d Ms. Stabenau smiled and added, \u201cI would say that we are, and that in addition to that now we\u2019re colleagues. It\u2019s a joy and it\u2019s another dimension for our relationship that has been just a lot of fun especially for me, and its also been so wonderful having that kind of support her so that I don\u2019t feel lost.\u201d Nevertheless, she explained, the mother-daughter pair both understand \u201chow much there still is to learn and how much there still is to teach and how much we have to discover about each other.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Last winter, Charlotte Stabenau, one of the newest additions to the Fieldston English department was not exactly an unfamiliar face \u2013 her mother, Annette Stoller, has been teaching literature here for many years. The Fieldston News sat down with the mother-daughter pair to talk about what it is like to be colleagues and to learn more about them. Growing up, Ms. Stabenau lived in many different cities with her father and her mother, whom we<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":16,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[58],"tags":[],"coauthors":[67],"class_list":["post-2109","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-slider"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/fieldstonnews.com\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2109","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/fieldstonnews.com\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/fieldstonnews.com\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/fieldstonnews.com\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/16"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/fieldstonnews.com\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2109"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/fieldstonnews.com\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2109\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2112,"href":"https:\/\/fieldstonnews.com\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2109\/revisions\/2112"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/fieldstonnews.com\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2109"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/fieldstonnews.com\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2109"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/fieldstonnews.com\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2109"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/fieldstonnews.com\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/coauthors?post=2109"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}