Rose Tomassi grew up in Portland, Oregon and has lived in New York City for the past eight years. Raised Catholic, she fully embraced her faith through encountering the Catholic lay movement Communion and Liberation during the 11th grade. During childhood, Rose experienced many different approaches to education. Before she was born as the eldest of five children, her mom studied the ideas of Maria Montessori, and incorporated them into her early childhood years, eventually sending her to a Montessori- influenced pre school as well. She then learned the basics of reading and writing from her grandmother, a retired primary school teacher, and this initiated her love for literature. Cycling through homeschooling and Catholic schools, Rose eventually found herself in the inaugural class at a small Catholic classical school called Ecce Veritas, and this is where her passion for learning and education took hold most strongly. While she had always been exposed to great literature and loved debating and discussing ideas, at this school she was able to read many of the same texts that students at Martin Saints read, such as Dante’s Divine Comedy, Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, and Augustine’s Confessions. Most importantly, she began to see what these books and the authors who wrote them had to do with her own humanity as someone created by God with an infinite desire for beauty, truth, and goodness. 

In college at Ave Maria University, Rose debated between majoring in Philosophy and Literature, ultimately settling on Literature. After graduating she entered a PhD program in English at the CUNY Graduate Center in NYC, where she also had the opportunity to teach Composition and Literature classes at City College of New York and New York City College of Technology. Eventually she decided to leave graduate school with a Masters degree in order to pursue a career in high school teaching. For the past several years, she has worked at St. Joseph High School, a small all-girls Catholic school in Brooklyn, NY, where she has taught courses in Philosophy, Writing, and Religion, in addition to developing marketing materials for the school and leading the Cooking Club. 

From a young age Rose also developed a love for craftsmanship, particularly in everything related to fiber arts. An early field trip introduced her to the process of shearing, carding and spinning wool, and over the years she learned hand-sewing, knitting, crochet, and most recently weaving. She also loves the process of surface design, in particular block printing. As the granddaughter and great granddaughter of seamstresses on her father’s side, she sees this interest as something that must run in the family. Another family speciality is cooking - growing up with an Irish-German grandma who taught herself to make Italian food for her Italian-American husband, Rose was exposed from an early age to delicious food and the process of preparing it. Meanwhile, she started baking with her mom as a toddler, and fondly recalls it as the way she learned both fractions and the value (when necessary) of precision. She and her dad share a special knack for being able to identify complex flavor profiles, and they both enjoy coming up with creative meals using whatever they find in the fridge and pantry.

At Martin Saints, Rose currently teaches 9th and 10 grade History, 9th grade Philosophy, Cooking, and Sloyd, and coordinates Frassati Fridays!