Sometimes when I’m sitting at my desk in my office during my lunch or after school, I catch myself thinking, “How did I get here? Who decided it was a good idea to give me a roster of kids and a classroom and a gym?”. It seems pretty unreal that I went to school for 4 and a half years and now have a job doing something I’ve found passion in.

I can’t say that I’ve always known that I wanted to be a PE teacher, or even a teacher in general. Last summer I was talking to someone I went to high school with and when I told her I was a teacher she said she couldn’t believe it. I had too short of a temper to have the patience for kids. So how did I get here?

I can remember being in fifth grade and being really interested in exercise. I was athletic. I liked PE. I played a couple different sports. When I got into high school I was undecided as to what I wanted to be when I grew up. I considered going into the police academy. I wanted to do something with biology. My brain was all over the place. As I got closer to graduation, I went back to my interest in sports and exercise and decided to go in that direction.

This idea was put on pause momentarily when I had to have surgery on both of my legs for compartment syndrome. I thought, “If I don’t recover well from this, I can’t do anything fitness related.” That’s when I started working more towards architecture and engineering. Thankfully, I recovered from my surgery and have become an even stronger athlete for it. I went to Bowling Green State University for Exercise Science.

One of the first classes you take as an Exercise Science major is Intro to Kinesiology. This course was great in helping you learn and decide what kind of career field you wanted to go towards after graduation. There were a lot of possibilities; cardiac rehab, personal training, corporate fitness, physical therapy, occupational therapy. I just couldn’t get excited about doing any of those things. I did know that I liked working with kids (I was a highly sought after babysitter) and I liked to play and participate in sports. All these things led me to change my major after my first semester. And I never looked back.

Once I left Bowling Green, I immediately began to work towards a second teaching license in health.

Now, I am a teacher at one of the biggest districts in the state of Ohio. I’ve had people from other districts, the National School Board Association, and Apple come into both my health classroom and my gym to observe my lessons. I love that and encourage anyone to come visit anytime because I’m proud of the work I do and I am more than happy to share my ideas, lessons, and creativity with others.