So I' m a brand new elementary teacher and this is my blog. I was just hired today in fact. I'll be teaching 4th grade at an elementary school here in Texas. I'm pretty psyched, the team of 4th grade teachers is really an incredible bunch of people and they all seem eager to help. The principal seems like a great lady too. There are 2 other males and three femals on the 4th grade team. It seems unusual to me to have as many males as females but I think it's a good setup.

For anyone that doesn't really know that much about me let me tell you a little bit about how I got to this point.

I graduated from Texas A&M University (WHOOP!) in May of '99 (although I was class of '98) with a degree in Speech Communications, a minor in Business and no idea what I really wanted to do. So I worked for a niche computer company for 2 years doing corporate client support. One can only sit and listen to clients with million dollar contracts yell at you about their computer for so long. An opportunity came up in 2001 to teach english in China and I jumped on it. I spent a year in northern (read "arctic") China teaching english to college freshmen and sophomores and trying to get them to quit saying "campurse" instead of campus as well as "famourse" and "idear." That was basically when the first seeds of a desire to teach as a career were planted. After that I came back to Murica and substitute taught until I got a job doing social work with middle school kids, then my wife graduated from school and we moved to another town in Texas where I worked in another job running a specialized learning program. It was under a social work umbrella but more on the education side of things. Well, this past spring of 2005 I decided that I could either keep finding these random jobs working in schools with kids doing things beside teaching or I could just bite the bullet and get my teaching certificate. I was accepted into a teacher certification program, finished in July and started looking for jobs. School started and I still didn't have anything until just this week when I got the call. I interviewed and two days later, I'm a teacher.

That's it...and now the adventure begins...

Dear God, please don't let me have any kids that act like I did.