I don’t know what I want to be when I grow up, but I am certainly enjoying the ride!
A love of reading and ten years as a middle school math teacher with computer classes here and there have prepared me well to be a Media Center Specialist, which has been my title for the past 7 years. I graduated from Houghton College in New York in 1977 with a BS in Chemistry and Math hoping to work in a research laboratory, and immediately made a detour to begin my teaching career in 1978. Antoine de Saint-Exupéry once said, “If you want to build a ship, don’t drum up people together to collect wood and don’t assign them tasks and work, but rather teach them to long for the endless immensity of the sea.” My passion then and now is to show students the immensity of the sea and give them the tools they need to build a ship or perhaps something even different and better!
I am currently the Media Center Specialist at Eastern Christian High School in North Haledon, NJ. Previously, while in the middle school media center, I taught CyberCenter, a class about all things tech, along with curating the collection (digital and analog) and doing the basic IT on all computers and the network. I often used CyberCenter as the tech adjunct to the core classes students were taking. With their teachers, I explored how CyberCenter could supplement what they were doing in their class. This sparked my interest in finding out how technology could enhance learning right in the classroom. When I arrived at the high school, I began Tech Topics, an after school class for teachers to learn new ways to engage students in their subject using technology. This brought me to pursue a Masters of Science in Educational Technology at Ramapo College in New Jersey, which I am working on at present.
In The Fellowship of the Ring by J.R.R. Tolkien, Gandalf says, “All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us” (60). What truly drives me and helps me in my decisions is my relationship with Christ. This is not about religion or church. It is about helping in a clinic in a town in Costa Rica founded upon a dump by Nicaraguan refugees, relief efforts in the Tohoku region of Japan 3 months after the Tsunami hit in 2011, clean-up in NJ after Hurricane Sandy or showing kindness and caring about the person pumping your gas. I think C.S. Lewis sums it up best in Mere Christianity when he says, “[To have faith in Christ] means, of course, trying to do all that He says. There would be no sense in saying you trusted a person if you would not take his advice. Thus if you have really handed yourself over to Him, it must follow that you are trying to obey Him. But trying in a new way, a less worried way. Not doing these things in order to be saved, but because He has begun to save you already. Not hoping to get to Heaven as a reward for your actions, but inevitably wanting to act in a certain way because a first faint gleam of Heaven is already inside you” (73) I daily want to take God’s advice. Service and love are a major component of his advice.
In this life, there is nothing more important to me than my husband, three sons, two daughter-in-laws and my granddaughters. I am truly blessed. There is nothing better than spending the day playing with my granddaughters while spurring their imaginations and encouraging a love of learning in them. When I am not in Japan visiting my granddaughters, or in New Jersey, encouraging teachers and students to tech-ily go where no one has gone before, I enjoy hiking, geocaching, and making music and iMovies wherever I am.
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Lewis, C. S. Mere Christianity. New York: Macmillan, 1952. 2002. Web. 22 Sept. 2013.<http://usminc.org/imag/MereChristianitybyCSLewis.pdf>.
“Quotes About Teaching.” Good Reads. Good Reads Inc., 2013. Web. 19 Sept. 2013.
<http://www.goodreads.com/quotes/tag/teaching>.
Tolkien, J. R. R. The Lord of the Rings / J. R. R. Tolkien. 2d Ed.[rev.]Collector’s Ed.Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1965. Print.