Kent (aka Pennsyltucky9) joins the TA team.
I’m long over due in bringing on board, a new Teacher Assistant to help out. TAs help out with some of the behind the scenes work, to keep Hotforwords website a fun place to visit. Kent has been a great contributer and a model student. We believe that he will be a great asset to the class. Without further ado, please welcome Pennsyltucky9! – Captain Jack
Here’s a (little) snippet Kent wrote for his biography.
I spent much of my childhood in the Upper Ohio Valley, where the Allegheny Mountains give way to rolling hills and Pennsylvania meets the states of West Virginia and Ohio. My parents both hold teaching credentials from a state school in upstate New York, where my Dad earned an English degree and my Mom earned a music degree. Since both my parents were teachers, we kids were constantly corrected on word usage and sentence construction, starting at an early age. I learned to read before I entered kindergarten, mostly because my Mom really enjoyed reading to us every night and always encouraged us to actively participate in the process. I was placed in advanced reading groups and excelled at spelling, but I was small for my age, so public school wasn’t a whole lot of fun for me. I loved the outdoors, however, and spent my summers barefoot, poking around creeks and forests and going camping with my family and friends whenever possible.
California was one of the places I visited during my travels, and I liked the idea of having access to both mountains and seacoast, so I moved to Northern California to start community college and have been here ever since. I studied French, anthropology, creative writing, geology, painting, design, judo, and mountaineering among many others. I found that I enjoyed rock climbing in the Sierra Nevada range quite a bit, but I still had to work for a living. Mostly, I did anything that I could to support my addiction to outdoor activities such as camping and rock climbing.
Quite by accident, I began work as a proofreader and eventually a graphic artist at some local newspapers. This seemed a good match for me until the advent of cheap desktop PCs, automated spell-checking, which all but replaced paste-up artists and proofreaders in the early 90s. So I found employment in the reprographic industry where I did large-scale production runs.
It was time to combine my urge to be outside with my passion for learning about nature. Interpretive ranger work seemed an excellent choice. I studied environmental conservation, and received Associate degrees in Natural Science as well as Parks and Recreation Management. Then I went on to a state university to finish out a bachelors degree program in Anthropology. I even worked as a seasonal ranger a couple summers to gain experience while in school.
It was during my bachelor’s degree program that I discovered YouTube when an instructor assigned a couple videos for the class to watch and evaluate. Once I was at the site, it was obvious that Marina’s videos were going to be mighty hard to pass up. I became a member after watching only two lessons. Soon I had to take care not to let HotForWords absorb all my study time!
As I completed my degree program, the economy fell through the floor. The National Park Service has cut its job rosters back. Now that school is done, I’m finally a free agent again. In the meantime, I look in on our dear teacher whenever I have a spare moment and she always makes me smile. – Pennsyltucky9 :smile:
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