My Teaching Experience

I grew up in England before coming to the States on a scholarship as a foreign student to a small liberal arts college in Indiana. Now after 11 years teaching Science at middle school and high school level and living in 3 different continents, 5 different states I feel I have many experiences that I bring to my classroom here on the Mexican border of Arizona. I began my full-time teaching career at the American Cooperative School for grades k-12 in Tunis, Tunisia teaching 6th through 10th grade and supervising both 11th/12th grade students as well as aiding elementary teachers with science programs. Diversity and improvisation were key factors in working with true multicultural classes of students where no one common language stood out and I had to constantly improvise science activities to work with local culture, resources and materials. I have the most exciting and colorful memories of those two years experience as a brand new teacher. Then I returned to the USA, to Arizona and have been teaching middle school for the last 9 years, first at 6th grade level teaching both science and language arts before switching to 7th grade science the past 3 years. I volunteered at Kartchner caverns for 18 months helping especially in monitoring the environment in the cave as part of the science team. I revelled in crawling around in the caves to take moisture, temperature, air pressure readings, and to sit at sunset counting bats as they left to hunt for food. I worked as a research analyst working in the pharmacology department at the University of Kentucky for 3 years before returning to school to become a teacher. In the lab I ran daily experiments using various machinery, performing surgeries, and running bioassays in various nicotine studies.

My Teaching Style

I have had many experiences in lab work and experimentation and I love leading my students through hands-on acitivities, the scientific method and experiments of all kinds. In the middle school setting, hard core chemistry or biology labs are difficult to do so I have designed and found a huge variety of activities and simple experiments that keep my students active, excited and intrigued with science. At least I hope so! I believe in giving everyone a chance to shine at some point so for me variety continues to be a key factor in my lesson planning. I offer the students a huge range of assignments, worksheets, text book readings, videos with worksheets, puzzles, artwork, team work, research essays, oral presentations, as well as the lab experiments and hands-on activities. In any one week the students are likely to have 5 very different assignments to tackle. I am always looking for new ideas and lessons to work into my curriculum.

Honors/Awards/Shining Teaching Moment

Honeywell Fellowship for Educators to attend NASA Advanced Space Camp, 2006. Changes in Altitudes Program, NASA Space Grant program, 2006. Cochise Chapter Teacher of the Year Award, Air Force Assoc, 2006. Honeywell Fellowship for Educators to attend NASA Space Camp, 2005. Medical Summer Research Program Fellowship, University Medical Center, Tucson, Arizona, 2001.

MY FEATURED PRODUCTS

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