Mari Hayashi, an adjunct lecturer in Japanese,
has been teaching at Lehigh University
since September 1997. She has over 15 years of
Japanese language teaching experience at the college
level and has been a lecturer in Japanese at
Haverford College, Villanova University, and the University of Pennsylvania.
At Penn, she was listed in the Undergraduate Course Guide’s “Hall of Fame” for havingone of the highest students rated courses of any instructor in the University. She began her teaching career at the University of Pittsburgh, where she earned an M.A. in Linguistics. She has also taught Japanese at the Pennsylvania Governor’s School for International Studies and at the Summer Intensive Business Japanese Course at the Georgia Institute of Technology. Before coming to America, she earned a B.A. from Ritsumaikan University, Kyoto, Japan and worked for 6 years at the Gifu Prefecture Board of Education.
She was born in Gifu city, Japan which is famous for its beautiful Nagara River, historical Oda Nobunaga’s Gifu castle and down-town Yanagase district, immortalized by the song “Yanagase Blues”. She enjoys playing scrabble with her husband and once scored 149 points in a single turn by simultaneously using all her letter while hitting two triple-word-score squares.