About the Teacher

Hello! I'm so excited to teach and learn from your student this year. Here is a little bit of my background and a few professional goals I've been developing over my teaching career. I look forward to working together to ensure your student's success this year!

I grew up in Forest City, NC, close to the Blue Ridge Mountains.

After high school, I earned a Bachelor of Arts in English and a Master of Arts in Teaching from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Go Tar Heels!

I have been fortunate enough to teach at Gravelly Hill Middle School for the past twelve years!

I have taught all grade levels throughout the subjects of ELA, SS, and AVID.

Go Grizzlies!

My children are also students in Orange County schools! I have one Grizzly in the 6th grade at GHMS and one Red Wolf in the 9th grade at CRHS.

At Gravelly

Please contact me with questions about any of these initiatives!

AVID Site Team

Spelling Bee Coordinator

experiences

CIDRE: I have been selected as one of fifteen local educators to participate in the CIDRE experience in Munich during the summer of 2022!

Cultural Investigation and Digital Representation for Educators (CIDRE)

CIDRE is a professional development program for educators offered by faculty in the Colleges of Education at NC State and Auburn. The goal of the program is to prepare educators to better integrate cultural lessons into teaching through the aid of media and technology to ultimately build greater cultural understanding among students in their classroom or institution. The program is funded by the Triangle Community Foundation's Borchardt Fund which underwrites costs for approximately 15 Triangle-area educators per year (Chatham, Durham, Orange, and Wake counties) to participate in professional development and two weeks of international travel in a designated host country. Saturday classes are held at NC State before and after traveling abroad. Further work time, planned group excursions, and free time in the host country, allow educators to conduct investigations into cultural themes of personal interest, practice digital representations of those themes (e.g., maps, AR/VR, writing, documentary, analytics), and reflect on effective approaches to teaching culture with their peers.

I have engaged in an educator's workshop through the National Endowment for Humanities. The workshop was held in Cleveland, Mississippi and called, "The Most Southern Place on Earth: Music, Culture, and History of the Mississippi Delta." Your student will be sure to hear some Blues this year! Check out the link above for photos and videos of what we learned.

I have also attended a National Endowment for Humanities workshop in New Orleans that focused on music, culture, and civil rights. Our students will learn about culture and resistance to oppression through music with materials I developed from this workshop.