I did not intend to become a teacher: if you asked me up until the age of 19 or 20, I was set on becoming a rocket scientist & working at NASA or similar. Looking back it was obvious: I really enjoyed tutoring, helping others, & had been in some way teaching for as long as I can remember. I had the drive to give back to the community that helped me succeed, & I could see myself in the students- the problems/issues they grappled with were so similar to the ones I had dealt with as a kid!

To learn about programming order-of-operations and explicit computer understanding, we did a Nutella and banana sandwich exercise. You have to write out the instructions, and then someone is picked, and they have to do ONLY the instruction, and can't get clarification, and can't edit to "what they THINK it meant". So a class losing it in laughter and tears because it said "Put Nutella all over the bread slice"... and the person "being" the computer not very happy with their classmate!

I've never been to Hawaii, so that's huge for me! A vacation with my spouse to Hawaii would be amazing...we never get to do that. So many other things that take up time and money. Recently, we've been thinking about redoing our kitchen - we want to restore our craftsman home to it's true glory. So the money would be a HUGE help to make that not just a high-floating-idea! It also would help us go solar - which is something we've been putting off until we can afford it.