I am a teacher, and I have always been a teacher. From my earliest memories of lining up my stuffed animals for instruction, to my years in retail sales and then a manufacturer's showroom, I have been teaching. I love learning and sharing knowledge with others.
I thrive in a learning environment, and I believe the classroom should be realistically rigorous but fun in order to engage everyone. Currently, I am enrolled in an online Master's program in Humanities from American Public University Systems.

After high school, I took one college course per semester for fifteen years as I worked to support myself. I lived and worked in Joplin, Springfield, and Kansas City, Missouri, then Los Angeles, California before I returned to school full-time at the beautiful Springfield campus of Missouri State. It was the most challenging undertaking I had ever faced!
I worked two to three jobs to pay the rent and took out Stafford Loans to pay for school. Once I earned a Bachelor of Science in Education from Missouri State University, I began teaching at a rural school at the Lake of the Ozarks. I taught seventh- and eighth-grade language arts and English I, II, and III, AND publications class in which we created the yearbook. (I still have deadline nightmares!) After four years of that, I was so burned out that I returned to the business world in Dallas, Texas, where the pay was better and the hours shorter. When the all-girls public school opened here, I taught at three Dallas-area middle schools waiting for my perfect teaching position. For the last three years, I have taught sixth-grade language arts to my brilliant girls, and I've never been more satisfied and productive!