Statement

Straight out of high school I will admit that I wasn't really sure what I wanted from my life. I didn't have a plan as to what I wanted to do or become.  I took college courses because that's what I was supposed to do, ad I took classes that were fun and challenging and exciting.  When I was offered a job at a supplemental instruction facility in Round Rock, Texas I withdrew from school and left to experience life away from home and classes.  What I gained from my time at Sylvan Learning Center as their Prescription Quality Review Manager, Lead Math Instructor, and Head Diagnostician was that seeing that look of understanding on a struggling student's face was worth more than any paycheck.  As their teacher standards caught up to the number of teachers in their employ, I found myself off the instruction table due to a lack of a college degree. I returned home, determined to complete my degree and do that which had called me: teaching.  Hard times hit my family, however, and the summer data entry position I had at CEVA Logistics turned into a full-time career of five years.  It was during those five years that I really matured.  I learned to manage my time effectively, completing multiple projects of great scale and complexity in a timely and orderly manner.  I learned to diffuse anger and aggression in my customers and coworkers with a pleasant and warm demeanor that spoke of confidence, caring, and grace.  I learned to work within a team, as a member and a leader.  I learned the fast paced world of corporate industry, and I learned that I ached to teach, to instruct, to inspire.  I returned to school and took a position in the Learning Assistance Center as an Instruction Leader.  I worked in the Undergraduate Research Lab with Dr. Lawton on an Outreach Project that is in currently in process of making an art instillation for IMAS, McAllen, Texas.  I was never so happy, content, and fulfilled as I was when I was helping students to master a skill they felt was beyond them. I never felt such pride as I did when a former student would pass me in the hall and thank me for helping them achieve what they had thought impossible.  I want this. I want this more than merely wanting. I am called to this, and to the students I will teach, I shall always strive to be that which inspired them to accomplish something they never thought they could.

An Outstanding Teacher

An outstanding teacher is inventive, adaptive, receptive, and inspirational.  An outstanding teacher is not afraid to look to other content areas, technology, and creative outlets to provide the information to students. An outstanding teacher captures the student's attention with the subject by nurturing a student's instinctive curiosity.

Scholarship Essay for HSF - Awarded

I read a poem, given to my husband for Father’s Day by my daughter’s daycare. It was written from the voice of a child speaking to her father – telling him that he is everything she wants to be when she grows up.

My parents were divorced long before I could understand what it meant for Mom and Dad to be a strong and cohesive unit. My life was between their households – single mom on one side, dad and stepmom on the other. The consistency came, not from family dinners, but from their united focus on education and the strong work ethic of their combined Hispanic heritage: my father, first generation Mexican-American, and my mother, naturalized citizen from Colombia, South America.

During junior high and high school, I would tutor – mini classroom sessions – my fellow classmates, even my own mother, on the various topics being taught to me. Often it was math that the other students did not understand, and often it was math that I was tutoring others in. I was quite the little math teacher – just like my father.

He recently retired, my father, after having been a math teacher his whole life, over forty-five years. I would sit with him, at the kitchen table, during my court-appointed weekends with him, and grade homework, tests, and quizzes. It was a thrill, learning to grade and administrate classroom work from him every other weekend, then have my mother and friends be my guinea pigs while I stumbled through trying to teach them. Teaching drives me. That look of understanding that blossoms on someone’s face is a drug that I try to hit on as often as often as possible, regardless of the subject at hand.

A handful of years ago, I joined a women’s flat track roller derby league. It’s a motley crew of women, nurses and teachers and office professionals. Each time we hold a recruitment drive, and there are new girls to train, to teach, to skate with, I’m the first to volunteer – nay, to beg – to work with them. And the same skills I use with them, that warm and easy going nature, unafraid of the spills of a full-contact sport, I bring with me now, during my Supplemental Instruction Sessions with the University of Texas – Pan American for Mr. Rivera’s Intermediate Algebra class.

All of this, all of my childhood spent helping my father grade papers, holding pseudo classes for my friends and family, training new skaters in a beloved sport, and the work I’m doing now at the University are all combining to prepare me for my ultimate goal, that of being an educator. An educator, not just of my chosen field of mathematics, but a true role-model as only an Educator can be. A person that inspires, not just excitement and fascination with a given subject, but a person that helps you look down into yourself, find the good that is there, and makes you feel that not only are you capable but you are destined to succeed. I want to be that person, for all the students whose lives I will touch.