Welcome!

   I suppose introductions are in order...To begin with, I teach Visual Arts and History at the Secondary School level.  I have been teaching for 9 years now.  Within the school I teach at, this means that I'm one of the more senior teachers.  We have veterans (teachers who have been teaching for 15+ years), but we are a mostly young staff.  That means that the majority of teachers in our school have been teaching for about 6 years or less.  That puts me in the middle of the road, in terms of experience, within my school.  This gives you a bit of a picture of me, but it is not "me" in entirety.
   I am newly married (we just celebrated our first anniversary) but have been friends for 10 years now, I am a new home owner, I love to cook, read and watch movies.  I am passionate about photography and about art.  I have long ago learned that my friends are my solace, and that counting husband among my best friends is one of the most important things in our relationship.
   My husband and I have a lot in common, and many of our differences challenge the other to expand who they are.  Among our commonalities, is the fact that he is also a teacher.  In fact, he teaches Phys'ed in the same school that I teach...and no, we did not meet at the school.  We met before we started working together.
   There are usually two fixed responses when people discover that we work at the same school;  people either think that "it's great" (getting to work together and see each other all day) or they wonder if it's "awkward".  The thing that many people don't think about is that we usually don't see each other throughout our day.  We're both in our respective classrooms, teaching, for our work day.  When we decided to teach at the same school, we made a decision to keep it professional at work.  This may make sense to most people, but to us this also means that we go through our day, for the most part, separately (we don't even eat lunch together, we eat with our friends/colleagues on staff).  We wanted to keep distinct and unique identities for ourselves within the school among both the staff and students.  We both felt that this was/is important as we want to be able to deal with students on an individual basis, not as each others' spouses.  That doesn't mean that we keep our relationship a secret, everybody knew that we were dating and knows that now we're married.
   This leads us to whether it is "awkward" to teach in the same school as my husband.  It is not.  I won't lie, it was at first.  It was weird when students would approach me and know something about my personal life (that we were dating).  It soon became something I got used to because that was where their information information and, for the most part, their questions...we were dating (or, as of last summer, we are married).  That's the end of the conversation because that's where we have always chosen to end the conversation - professionalism in the workplace.

   Is there anything else about me you should know?  I'm sure there is, but that's enough for now.  As I soak up the last couple weeks of summer vacation and my brain begins to turn once again to the classroom, I will leave you with a thought.  In this blog want to relay something of what I have learned, and continue to learn from the students.  My students are approaching the world from a point in life and from within a generation that we have labelled with terms like awkward, troublesome, lazy, apathetic, unengaged, and selfish.  What were the adults saying about you and the teens of your generation?
   It really all comes down to one word.  It is the word that I use to advise my photography students on how to achieve better images.  It is the word that can reflect change and can be the difference between a problem and a solution.  It is the word upon which I base my blog.

Perspective