Many people in education are "called" to the profession, however, my path to education was not so succinct. In fact, prior to stepping into the classroom, I cut hair for an international company for ten years. After I had my son, I left a successful career in the salon in search of another career with a schedule that was more fit for a family, where I didn’t have to work nights, holidays, and weekends. I went to a local community college and as I transitioned from one major, radiography technician, to another, cosmetology instructor, an English professor told me that I would make a great high school English teacher.

 

Teaching English was something I never considered, but upon his recommendation, I pursued it. Little did I understand at the time, that although I might not be physically on campus during nights, holidays, and weekends, a career in the classroom would mean my brain would never stop thinking up ways to best help students become better readers, better writers, better communicators, and more informed citizens. No matter where life takes any of the students I work with, the skills that are honed in my classroom are skills needed to live life, and the more well-read, well-written, and communicative a person is, the more successful they are apt to be.

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In my first year of teaching, I taught Reading I and II, remedial classes for high school freshmen and sophomores that struggled to pass the English I and II STAAR tests. It was there that I found a deep desire to know so much more than I currently knew about building struggling readers and writers into successful readers and writers. In my second year of teaching, I interviewed for a place in the Master of Reading program at The University of Texas at Tyler. I was accepted and started the summer before my third year of teaching.

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The Reading program has taught me evidence-based strategies to use with readers and writers of all levels. In addition to strategies, it has also given me exposure to assessment measures that indicate a student’s independent, instructional, and frustration levels, as well as how to design instruction based on the needs of an individual students. With these skills, it is my goal to bring the position of Reading Specialist to the high school level. Specifically, once students get to high school in my area, very little targeted intervention is done by qualified reading specialists. Through the addition of a Reading Specialist to high school campuses, students that struggle to read and write can receive targeted, evidence-based intervention that can grant them the skills they need in reading and writing to be successful in life.

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