Jan Sidebotham

Jan Sidebotham has been an avid Open University student since she took the course on Middlemarch (and subsequent courses on Bleak House, The Golden Bowl, Tess of the d’Urbervilles, Mrs. Dalloway, Absalom, Absalom, and War and Peace).
With a B.A. in Comparative Literature from Kirkland/Hamilton Colleges and an M.A.T. from Brown University, she taught in private schools in Brookline, MA and the Washington, DC area. Over a 30 year career, she estimates that she has taught both The Scarlet Letter and The Great Gatsby over 25 times. (The only book she has read and taught more is To Kill a Mockingbird, which she recommends to mature readers if they haven’t read it in a few decades.) After spending many summers in Chatham, she moved to live year round in Harwich and loves every season on the Cape. She occasionally knits, paints, draws cartoons, and (always, not occasionally) delights in her children, Susannah, a 30 year old writer in San Francisco, and Henry, a 27 year old teacher in Mumbai.