Here we go!

So this blog has been created for my Educational Psychology class this summer. However, my intention will be to actually use this to highlight my experiences, past present and future, as a teacher and life-long learner, and continue to use this blog long after this class is over.  Just as a background on me, I am an artist by birth and a printmaker by training.  I have taught college for over six years at a number of institutions (private, public, two-year, four-year, religious and not) in Tennessee and South Carolina in a variety of media, plus Art History.  My family brought me back to East Tennessee and a job at the University of Tennessee where I worked for a year.  However, my passion lies in teaching and after that year I sorely missed the classroom and desperately wanted to return.  An opportunity arose for me to teach Art at a local, public high school and I jumped at the opportunity, though it scared me to death.  Not only did it mean that I'd have to return to college not as a professor but as a student to earn my teaching certification, but also my own high school experience was so drastically different from the environment that I work, so therefore I had no like-experiences to pull from.  The first year was definitely a trial by fire, but I learned so much! Whenever folks ask me how I like teaching high school, my response is, "It's never a dull day!"  Some days it's good, and some it's bad, but never the same and never mundane.  And that's one huge reason why I love to teach...nothing is ever the same!