Who Am I?

Teaching has been my occupation for the past few years, but it has also been my passion. Having the chance to see the expression of a person transform from muddled confusion to complete understanding is the ultimate affirmation of my choice to become an educator. As a teacher I have aspired to be innovative and exciting, always looking to learn more about what it means to be an effective and caring teacher.

I like to think that I have undergone a complex evolution as a professional educator. At each step along the way my knowledge, beliefs, and aims were honed in an important way. My development is by no means complete, and I crave the next experience that will mold and shape me into an even finer educator.

Currently I work for the San Diego Unified School District’s Educational Technology Department.  My primary focus has been to support the ESETT (Enhancing Science Education Through Technology) grant.  Recently, I chose to participate in the SDSU Edtec Master’s Program in order to extend my knowledge of how good teachers teach and what tools today’s teachers can use to capture the imagination of students and motivate them to develop a life-long desire to learn, create, achieve, and inspire.

The Primordial Sludge

I began as an amorphous, single-celled organism. I lacked direction and clear goals for the future. These were my college years.

Because my nervous system was not fully developed, the classes I chose were not based on some artful plan but based on a gut feeling about what I enjoyed. In my four years at Illinois Wesleyan University, I majored in biology because I loved to learn about the world around me, I minored in philosophy because learning about the world only led to more and more questions that intrigued me, and I took many studio art classes because I simply enjoyed creating.

Since none of these areas were chosen based on a path that I had determined that I would follow, my final days at IWU left me wondering, “Okay, so what now?” I actually had to think about what I wanted for the future, so I chose to attend graduate school in philosophy because on some level, I knew I wanted to teach, and that I always wanted to learn.

Beginning to Differentiate – The Second Stage of Evolution

No longer completely unformed, I became a somewhat differentiated multi-cellular organism as I began a Ph.D in philosophy at University of California, San Diego. My plan was to teach philosophy at the university level. It was a degree I was destined never to complete. Although philosophy held great fascination for me, the path of my evolvement took a dramatic turn when I had this crazy idea to take an education class one semester.

This one class that changed everything and finally gave some focus and clarity about what I would do in the future was taught by Larry Rosenstock, who was instrumental in the creation and design of High Tech High in San Diego as well as several other innovative schools on the East coast.  He introduced our class to new paradigms in education such as Deborah Meier’s small school in New York City where kids took only two cores classes and volunteered during school hours and his own experience with redesigning high schools like the vocational high school in Boston where students got credit for physics in woodshop.  He talked about students having internships and jobs during school hours, and most importantly, he said that educators could think outside the box – schools don’t have to be constrained by a seven period day with each course neatly confined to its own time slot.

Despite my initial resistance to the idea that high school especially could be in any way different from the way it was when I was in school, I eventually became inspired and felt that I finally had a true direction. I transferred from the philosophy program into teacher education and was determined to be a part of the force that would update and revolutionize education.

The Current Stage of Growth and Development

Having spent five years teaching science at the middle school level and continuing to develop as an educator, I have enterred my current stage of complexity. Now as a resource teacher in the Educational Technology Department of San DIego Unified School District I have begun to work with many science teachers as they work toward achieving their own goals as an educator. My part in their evolvement has been to support them in the use of various technology tools that they have incorporated into their teaching and help them to use those tools with the best practices in education in mind. To this end, I have decided that an important foundation for any future work with teachers and educational technology would be a Master’s Degree in Edtec that will provide a strong background in what exactly is best practice in education and develop my skill in using technology tools to enhance and achieve best practice.