I am a Texas certified English Language Arts and Reading teacher, but my career began before I walked into the classroom in the 2020-2021 school year. Before I began teaching in K-12, I worked for two of the major mobile providers in technical support and sales. Mobile tech support is very similar to teaching, and AT&T professionally trained me with Android and iOS representatives in how to troubleshoot issues through probing questions to scaffold where customers did or did not understand their device. My technical skills made me into a better salesperson when I worked face to face versus in a call center. Being able to assess my customers needs through conversation is the same as probing questions used to scaffold lessons in the classroom. My skills helped me through completing my bachelor’s degree in 2019 after being a poor student for almost a decade.

Therefore, when I walked into the classroom during the COVID 19 pandemic in August 2020, I had no struggles learning how to be a hybrid teacher through Google Classroom. I worked in an alternative high school, so my own background as a bad college student gave me a perspective about why my students struggled. An alternative high school is for students who have disengaged from the educational processes due to a variety of external factors such as teen pregnancy, drugs, and/or homelessness. My students were a mirror of myself when I was younger, and my experiences helped me understand how to help them value their education.

The technical background I came with placed me in a vital technical support space on my campus. Teachers and admin would come to me for a variety of technical issues and/or questions. By the 2022-2023 school year, my principal recognized my skills as useful in the role of Campus Technology Leader. In my role I was responsible for learning and disseminating educational programs to my colleagues, but the part I enjoyed the most was developing the campus website for my school. The information on our website was poorly constructed and had been on there for years, and I had a different view in designing our schools site. Students and their parents rarely seek school sites on a computer in low-socioeconomic areas, the district I worked in was Title 1, but typically through their mobile phone. With that in mind, I re-organized the school website through troubleshooting various site templates and how it would appear on my phone.

After the 2022-2023 school year, I began the bpath of furthering my own education by enrolling in a Masters in Education program at Texas Tech University. I began my Master in Education, with a focus in curriculum and instruction, in the summer of 2023 and walked the stage for my diploma in December 2024. My first time in college was atrocious, and going back for my masters is the beginning of my career in higher education. One of my personal goals is to expand some of my graduate writing into something worthy of being published. The most important skills I have are creative thinking and lifelong learning, I think outside the box in many ways and I enjoy learning. There is not a technical skill I cannot find information about online and learn in my own way. Working in technology has demonstrated to me that the most valuable skill today is being able to adapt to constant change, which is being able to learn and teach yourself any skill you need.