Let's start at the beginning: I was born "right here in River City," and my parents still live in the same house that was my first house. (Just so we're clear on this, I, however, am not still living with them). After graduating from MCHS in 1986, I attended the University of Iowa. I'm proud to have attended such a literary school in such a literary town. And I probably would have stayed in Iowa City if weren't for...
...graduating and getting a job. That first job was in Bakersfield, California, the Country Music Capital of California. Some call it the Armpit of California. Either way, it's a pretty fun experience to live in California when you're 23 and you have a good job. I skied as much as I could, got sunburns on beaches from San Diego to San Luis Obispo, and, oh yeah, learned a little about how to teach.
As wonderful as California is, my family is very close, and to be that far away became rather expensive for all of us. It was time to move back to the Midwest. So I began teaching at Valley High School in West Des Moines, then at Indian Hills Junior High and Valley Southwoods Freshmen High School. West Des Moines is where I really learned to love this career. I had the privilege of working with some very smart, dynamic educators and was challenged every day to become a better teacher. In 1997 I won a Fulbright to study in Romania and Bulgaria, and in 2003 I earned my MA in Secondary Education. As a result of these experiences, I decided that I wanted to enter the world of academia permanently.
In 2003, I was accepted into the Social Foundations of Education PhD program at the University of Iowa. I then decided to move permanently to Iowa City in order to pursue the degree with more vigor. Beginning in the summer of 2005, I started full-time work at ACT writing tests for the English and Reading sections of the ACT exam while I simultaneously pursued that PhD. Within about two months of the move, I knew that my first love was public school teaching. I didn't want to sit around and talk about education; I wanted to be doing it. That next spring I started looking around for teaching openings, thinking it unlikely that I would find anything right away. Wouldn't you know? An opening at my old high school appeared in an online job search engine I used, and twenty years--to the day--that I graduated from MCHS, I was offered a teaching position.
Perhaps one day I'll go back and finish that PhD, but I would also like to teach overseas, travel a lot more, and to spend as much time as possible with my niece and nephew while they're still young and think I'm the cool aunt. In the meantime, I love the challenge of my current position, and I love that, even after all this time, I still have so much to learn about this career and so much to learn from a new crop of kids every year.
These days you'll find me most likely walking around town or at Lime Creek with Franny Blue, my 10-year-old Bichon mix; cooking; reading; watching TV; shopping with my sister; playing video games with my 17-year-old nephew; reading books with my 14-year-old niece; or where we started this little story, at my parents' house. You never know where a journey will take you, and sometimes, like Dorothy, you find that there's no place like home.