This past June, my husband and I got married. Soon, I became a Dallas girl! I am loving teaching at a Dallas-area private school and am having a blast learning and growing through Lamar University.
Since a young age, I have been surrounded by teachers. My mom was a teacher, my grandmother was a teacher, my mom’s friends were teachers, my sister and I played school and she was my teacher. I learned to love learning because it was fun. The world provided me with so many questions to ask. Eventually, I decided to force my 4-year-old younger brother to sit though “fun school” daily with me in our outdoor play house. There was some leveraging that certainly occurred.
“If you play school with me, I will set up your Thomas the Tank Engine track with you,” I would say. My brother sat through my teaching as I taught the things I was currently learning in school.
This love for teaching continued until I made it to middle school. I had a distaste for sitting in classrooms for 2-3 hours every day after school, waiting on my mom to be ready to leave. To this day, the magic combination of Sprite and a Rice Crispy Treat remind me of spending my never-ending afternoons in my mother’s classroom. Yes, I spent hours playing after school, but the reality of how much time, effort, and love my mother put into it intimidated me. As a result, I set my sights on another promising career I had heard of from one of our close family friends: counseling.
In the middle of high school, she introduced me to Viktor Frankl’s book “Man’s Search for Meaning”. In the book, Viktor Frankl discusses how he survived the Holocaust to be able to publish his once-destroyed manuscript about his research on Logotherapy. Once I learned how applicable Logotherapy was to all people and industries, I was enamored with the idea of supporting others find meaning and purpose in life.
In 2014, I began my undergraduate degree at Baylor University in Psychology. Once I discussed career opportunities with others, I decided school counseling would be the best route for me to follow. Along the way, I met an incredible professor who convinced me to begin my career in education by majoring in education. I somehow was encouraged to teach math, which was my least favorite subject while growing up. I spent the past two years teaching 5th grade math. Now, I am loving spending the time helping kiddos learn, explore, and engage their voice in the world around them in the 6th and 7th grade math classroom. God works in crazy ways!
Impressively, the trends in education have been pushing to provide students with real-world, applicable tasks that lead to authentic learning. Although this is valuable, it is almost as if we have forgotten that our intrinsic motivation and drive can only be amplified by having a “why”. I am constantly searching for ways to help students discover an answer to “Why?” is there a need for math and what is their own “why”.
I am excited to share what I learn with you this year and years to come in the classroom and in my studies with Lamar University’s M.Ed. in Digital Learning & Leading program.
Education with Meaning 