The Tidewater area will always be special to me; most of my immediate family and life-long friends live in Chesapeake, Portsmouth, and Suffolk where I grew up and spent the early years of my adult life. I received my Bachelor’s degree in English Education from ODU back in 1995 and my Master’s degree in English from Liberty University in 2011.

This is Ramona’s Dad playing Candy Crush for the first (and probably the last) time while Domino looks over his shoulder.

I’ve been teaching for 9 years (4 years of high school and 5 years at the college level); I love the fact that I get to “reinvent myself” every semester, and I am in love with learning. Of course, after looking at the syllabus the first night of class, I was second-guessing my passion! But viewing these new technologies as scary is healthy in that I am able to feel what many of my students feel when they are approaching writing. So, even if I feel uncomfortable, I know this is good for me.

I am locked into a very traditional system that is similar to the “math class format” which Dr. Rodrigo mentioned our first night (not that I mind), but I want to know how to “marry” some of these new media theories with our school’s traditional way of doing things. The ultimate goal, of course, is how to most effectively reach my Freshmen composition students so that they are the ones learning.