I was born in the very small town of Dos Palos, California.  I lived there until 9th grade when I moved to Merced, CA. I graduated from Merced High School, then Merced Community College, and transferred to UC Santa Cruz. I graduated from UCSC with a major in Linguistics and completed my teaching credential work through UCSC.

After college, I worked as a chef’s assistant in the kitchen at the Wawona Hotel in Yosemite while applying for teaching positions.

My first official teaching position was teaching summer school to primarily migrant students in the elementary school that I had attended, in Dos Palos. It was an experience to come back to my school and teach with teachers and administration that I had known as a student! I even taught in the classroom where I had been a 5th grade student, the year John F. Kennedy was assassinated. (I remember that day clearly!)

After the summer school position, I took the position here at Clear Creek in 1975.  At that time, the old school was still standing where the parking lot is now. I taught kindergarten through fourth grade and Mrs. Chamberlin taught fifth through eighth grade.  We were in the two- room school with a small kitchen in the back for making lunch. Students would bring soup in the winter and heat it on the stove, or borrow silverware for their lunches and wash dishes at the end of lunch. There were 42 students that year. The kindergarten students were out of school at noon, but most parents would not pick them up because they had other children in school.  I would give them coloring things in the corner of the room, and encourage them to look at books and nap on the blankets I had brought in.
It was quite an education for ME!  I learned a lot that year!
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In 1979, I began taking classes again toward my Masters Degree at Sacramento State and Chico State.  With night classes once a week and some summer school sessions, I finished my Masters in Education program in 1985, with my degree from Chico.