I hold a Bachelor's degree in English from the University of Maryland and a Master's degree in TESOL (Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages) from Notre Dame University of Maryland. I was in the very first graduating class from Notre Dame for their newly minted TESOL program, and really enjoyed learning from my advisor and instructor who developed the program. I taught briefly at local community colleges in Maryland while working on my degree and stuck with it for a couple of years after graduation. My first official teaching gig out of college was for an advanced class of ESL learners who were studying for the TOEFL. This class, as it turned out, was almost completely full of young nannies from all over the world for whom taking English classes was a requirement, and two non-nannies who happened to be young Italian men. It was a FUN semester! My target students were young adults -- high schoolers, college students, or older -- for whom English was not their first language. I enjoy focusing on the advanced grammar, reading, and writing classes with this population, probably because I really enjoyed my own English lit and grammar classes in high school and college. I find many of my adult and "almost-adult" students are engaged and eager to learn. The highlight of many of those classes was having students proclaim they learned a lot and like reading and writing and grammar a lot more than they used to. It's extremely rewarding to know that someone feels more comfortable in these subjects than they did before, and that I had a part in helping with that. I enjoy reading and writing and don't shy away from speaking, though I rarely have cause for that. In my professional career, I have also worked as a business writer and editor and project manager, mainly in the IT field. Given that experience, I was asked to teach professional writing classes, which I did for an adult population, as well, and really enjoyed; it combined my love of English and teaching with my everyday job tasks and made for an easy application to "real life" for the students who were new to business writing. When I am not in front of a computer or reading a book, I prefer to spend spare time outdoors as much as possible, including on the sidelines at sports events, if I can't be hiking or otherwise exploring somewhere.