In college, I had aspirations of having a career in some capacity in law enforcement. To assist with this, I graduated from college with a double major in Criminal Justice and Sociology. For a few years after that, I used these degrees in the field of criminal justice, but couldn't visualize doing this long-term as a career. At that point, my life course began to bend and arc as I moved to a new state, and found a new job. This job utilized my degrees, but it also included education because I knew that was the career that I wanted to pursue. A few years later I applied to and was hired in a public high school as a Special Education Teacher, teaching several different core classes. This, of course, meant going back to school to get a teaching degree. This new job excited me, but of the different core classes that I taught, one in particular was my favorite to teach: history. Five years later, with some more education, I made the jump from Special Education to Social Studies at the high school level. Fast forward to now and I am a veteran teacher with over 20 years of experience working in the classroom. In my teaching career, I have taught a variety of high school students at all levels, from regular to Advanced Placement (AP). In addition to all of the typical experience of a veteran teacher, I bring some other unique skills to the table. Since 2018, in addition to my traditional face-to-face classes, I have also taught sections of online social studies courses in my district's online virtual academy. Having started this in 2018 gave me an advantage in 2019 as we went into remote learning. As a result, I feel very comfortable teaching remotely. Another opportunity that I have undertaken since 2020 is scoring the AP United States History written responses for College Board in the summers. Doing this has given me valuable insight into how to effectively write in order to earn the most points. As a result, I have passed these insights on to my students, and their scores have gone up significantly on the AP Exam. Finally, as a lifelong learner, I continue to seek out and attend professional development opportunities regularly to learn more content and methodology to help my students.

In my free time I like to read nonfiction books, listen to podcasts, travel to historic sites, hike, swim, and cook.