Another Introduction

From M. Shelley
I guess you could say that we wanted to start playing around with writing about the ideas that we often struggle through in conversation, and thus, this blog was born.

I'm in my 13th year in the business--the only business that I have really ever known in my adult working life. That means 11 years in the high school classroom in three different states and five different schools if I include my student teaching semester. The other two years were full time graduate coursework for me, where I supervised student teachers and taught methods classes to earn my keep at my university. The graduate degree is still plaguing me as I try to finish my thesis along side teaching high school full time.

I have taught in a wide variety of settings: urban, suburban, semi-rural. And even though each of these settings brings with it a unique set of challenges, there are some things about this job that have been universal for me: I love what I do and I know there is nothing else I'm supposed to be doing, even though it exasperates me at times. The joy comes in dealing with the students. The frustrations come in how everything else often gets in the way of providing an educational experience for each student that will enable him or her to thrive as a human being.

(Hopefully F. Scott and I will remember to focus just as much on those joys in this blog as we do on the frustrations.)