My husband-to-be, Tim, and I moved to Denver, CO, where I worked as a substitute teacher until I gave up on teaching and got a job in an oil and gas firm as a production clerk/analyst. Teaching did not give up on me, however. Within a year, I was training new employees. An enjoyment of math which had lain dormant since high school had also been rekindled.

In 1984, my husband, one-year-old daughter, Rachel, and I moved to Winston-Salem, NC. Five years later, with a second daughter, Hannah, aged one and a half, I earned a M.A.Ed. in gifted education and secondary math certification from Wake Forest University. I wanted to teach upper level high school math courses. I especially wanted to work with under-served and under-achieving gifted students.

In 1991, I was hired by the Carroll County School Board to teach language arts and social studies to gifted kindergarten through ninth grade students. Two years later, Carroll County schools went through a major reorganization and I ended up teaching sixth grade math. I was teamed with a social studies/science teacher and a language arts teacher. For the next seven years, my teammates and I had a blast with our sixth graders.

Then, through a connection of friends and colleagues, I learned that NRCC needed someone with a master's degree to teach an evening class. This was the first time I had taught a college-level class and my introduction to NRCC. My language arts teammate noticed a greater enthusiasm in me. With the encouragement of this dear friend, I began teaching at Carroll County High School the next year and I continued teaching as adjunct at NRCC. In 2003, NRCC hired me as a member of its full-time faculty. How lucky and blessed I feel!