Welcome!

Welcome to my blog! I have been wanting to start blogging about my experience teaching, planning, and day-to-day life for some time now, but have always had some sort of obstacle keeping me from starting. I decided summer is the best time to start, since it is the time when teachers have more time to relax and recharge. I have been enjoying my summer vacation so far, although it is in some ways just beginning now. I taught summer school for four weeks directly after school was dismissed for the summer. I also took a two-week long trip to Florida with my family to enjoy the attractions and spend quality time together. I just returned from that trip this weekend, and am ready to work on school-related activities, including starting my blog, outlining and creating products for my Teachers Pay Teachers store, and planning my upcoming school year. This will be my fourth year at my school, and I am excited to build upon prior lessons and units and make improvements to activities as the year goes on!

I have been teaching in my own classroom for three years, and have been involved with education in some way, shape, or form since I graduated college. (If you count my own education, then I have been involved in this world since I was 4!) I worked at a day program for adults with developmental disabilities when I first graduated with my English degree, instructing the group on how to competently complete their tasks at their workplace while also making quality connections with them and my coworkers. I loved this job, and as I look back on it now, I see that it was teaching, in its own form and purpose. After I had been working there for about 3 years, I decided to go to grad school to obtain my teaching certification and Master’s degree in teaching to become a secondary English teacher. I continued to work there for 2 more years during the summer until I was hired at my current school.

I worked at a large, local high school as an intern for one year before I started student teaching. I will do another blog post about my internship and student teaching experience, as well as a more in-depth post on the interview process and my first year of teaching. I spent two years substituting, both short and long-term, which I will also write about in the coming weeks. All of the opportunities, schools, students, colleagues, and years leading up to signing my first contract have helped me become the educator I am today.

I began creating products for my classroom as soon as I was hired and learned the curriculum. I then decided to open my Teachers Pay Teachers store in my second year of teaching, as I noticed there were minimal resources for a novel I was teaching.

I am excited to start my blogging journey and make new connections with other teachers. I truly believe we learn best while working together, for a common purpose, which for me, is always my students. I often affectionately refer to them as my “tiny humans,” which is a reference I borrowed from Grey’s Anatomy.

“These are the tiny humans. These are children. They believe in magic. They play pretend. There is fairy dust in their IV bags. They hope, and they cross their fingers, and they make wishes, and that makes them more resilient than adults. They recover faster, survive worse. They believe.” And I believe in them.