I came to teaching quite on accident. Never did I think I wanted to be a teacher or it would be a profession that I would enjoy. But after getting to teach high risk high school students showed me there is nothing else I rather do. I went to college to study science, and went to work for the public health laboratory in Wisconsin. During the 10 years I was employed there I worked my way up from an entry microbiologist to a senior forensic toxicologist. I really thought I was doing good by helping keep drunk drivers off the road, but slowly started to realize I was just helping put people with addiction problems in jail. Jail is not the place for people with mental health issues. Wanting to be a positive force in my community I started to look for volunteer opportunities. I found one that I thought would be great for me. It was helping take the over production of produce in summer and help preserve it for distribution in food pantries during the winter months. The program was just starting at the Goodman Community Center, and I was helping get it started. Long story short, they ended up hiring me to design and run this program. One part of this program was community outreach and education. This is how I became a teacher.Over the next year I went from teaching once or twice a week to teaching full time. I taught both math and science through cooking and food preservation. Since I was working at a community center, I was also able to help my students with any other personal issues they were trying to overcome. This included everything from getting a job to making sure they had food when they went home that night. I LOVED teaching and working with my students. After 5 years of teaching and working for the community center I thought I needed to advance my career. I was so driven in my science career I assumed I needed to do the same in my new teaching career. Role of technical trainer seemed to be the perfect fit, so I left my job at the community center to start working for a pharmaceutical company. It did not take me long to realize this was not the career advancement I was hoping for and I just wanted to be working with kids. While teaching at the community center I had to develop all my own lesson plans with very limited resources, and this gave my teaching a purpose. I want to do that again. Keeping my students engaged and motivated is what kept me learning and striving to become the best teacher I could. I want to bring this to new students around the world.