About Me

My name is Angela McKellar. My husband, Michael, and I have been married for 3.5 years. We have a daughter, Adia, who's 14 months old and just working on walking and talking. We also have a white, Siberian Husky named Stella. On September 19 we will be closing on our first house! Which is exciting and a little daunting. The house hasn't been kept up extremely well and is in need of quite a few updates. So, after possession we'll be tackling putting in new flooring and painting and buying new appliances. It's going to be a lot of work, but it will feel so good to have a house that feels more like our home.

I am certified in Secondary Education with an English major and Biology minor. I spent almost 4 years as a pre-med major before I realized I hated the medical field. I was working full time in a mail order pharmacy, handling growth hormone patient profiles when some scheduling issues forced me to quit. I got a job in the Butterworth inpatient pharmacy soon after, which lead me to realize I hated the medical field. That semester I had an English class leading me to realize I was spending all of my spare time and then some trying to keep my grades up, I was always stressed out and never had time to recharge. After reading literature for my World Literature class, it dawned on me that part of why I was so unhappy was because I hadn't been reading what I enjoyed for years and that's what recharges me. Even when I was a pre-med student I was looking forward to educating my patients; I had so many mom's ask me about their kid's diagnosis and what else they could do besides just give their kid hormone shots. I realized a lot of doctors don't actually educate their patients well and I wanted to be different. So, becoming a teacher and getting involved in education was an obvious choice. I just wished I had made the switch earlier.

This semester I'm teacher assisting at Wyoming Junior High in a 7th grade English class. I have one hour that's general education and the other two are honors classes. So far my CT has been awesome and GVSU faculty and WPS teachers adore her.

In my spare time I usually have my nose in a book. Lately I've been big into young adult books because I figure I need to know the field well since that's what the bulk of my students will be reading [side note: if you're looking for a good YA book, Red Queen by Victoria Aveyard is fantastic!]. My CT has her students do reading logs and I want to do that with my future students as well. I hear a lot of complaints from students about not liking to read, when I think if I can help them find a book that's a good fit for them, it may solve some of the problem. So, I try to be well versed in YA literature. If I'm not reading, I'm usually doing something else artsy like writing or painting or crocheting. In the evenings, I like to kickback with shows on Netflix if my kiddo goes to bed nicely.

I haven't had a ton of experience using technology in the classroom. My CT usually has a powerpoint slide up when the students come in the classroom with the bellringer on it or with instructions for the kids. We enrolled the students in our google classroom the other day and gave them an assignment to complete with it. A handful of students wanted to edit the HTML code instead of typing their assignment or messed around flipping the screen. I can see it being possibly a bit more than some students can handle, but I think it will be nice when having students do timed writing or certain activities because it helps with legibility problems when grading it and is a nice resource to have.

Below is video of my husband, myself and our daughter on her first birthday that we celebrated this July.