Practice Post

My name is Holli and I was born in Tuscaloosa, Alabama. My major interests are music, art, and I crochet for fun (I know, I sound like an old fuddy-duddy). I found myself here at USA shortly after I got married. My fiancé already had a job in Bay Minette at Quincy Compressor, so instead of finishing my schooling at UA where we met, I moved down here to start our life together and here I am. A little something interesting about me, during my time at UA, I marched in the Million Dollar Band. The two years I marched we had the Shreveport, LA bowl games. Of course, and go figure, the year that I quit marching, we win the National Championship. I had joked for the longest time that if I had quit sooner, then we might have won sooner haha! I have another interesting fact about my family. For starters, when he was younger, my dad was a body builder. He wanted to pursue the professional track, but he stopped shortly after I was born. When he turned 50 and had the well-known "mid-life crisis", he took the hobby back up again. Three years later, my dad won the title of Mr. Tuscaloosa at one of state-wide competitions. Since then, he has placed it on the back burner so to speak. I suppose his reasoning was to "go out on a high note".

Going back to my passions of music, art, and crochet, I have done all three since I was a small child. I learned to play the piano at a young age in elementary school, and stopped after I completed 6th grade. So as a total, I had about 5 years of piano instruction (I know! That's a LONG time!). As far as art goes, I have always loved to do the occasional doodle, but it was not until recently that I took up painting. I find that I enjoy the acrylic and oil paints the best. I would love to be better at it, moving on from doing silhouettes and being able to paint more intricate and complex subjects. Crochet is something I have been doing since I was 12 years old. My grandmother was determined to teach at least one of her 13 grandchildren how to crochet, and I ended up being the only one who stuck with it. I have made numerous blankets, hats, gloves, booties, socks, even knickknacks like iPhone and iPad cases. Pretty much: you name it, I can make it haha, or sit down and take a couple of hours to figure out the pattern. I had always planned to have a booth at one of the local trade-shows that went on closer to Tuscaloosa, but now that I have moved down here, it will have to be put on the back burner for a little while.

I have always had a desire to enter the education field. Even as a young child I would play "teacher" with my dolls or toys, pretending to teach them to add and subtract by using markers on my mirror, which never made my mother very happy ha. I suppose the "big girl" reason I want to be an educator is my desire to mold my students' young minds and to instill in them good moral values and a desire to learn. Ultimately, I want to make a positive impact in their lives, and help shape them into the people they will grow up to be. Learning is a very powerful tool, and if students have a continuous desire to learn, I feel their lives can be enriched and benefitting to them beyond imagine. I am a very big fan of using the arts when making lesson plans and will definitely utilize them with my own students. By using my passions of art and music to reach my students and help them to learn, I feel they will benefit from this far greater than any sort of boring "pencil and paper" routine that, like me and most other students currently, follow(ed) on a daily basis.

Below are some fun pictures I added :) I would have added a crochet picture, but apparently I don't have any at the moment :(

My husband and me at our wedding


One of my first paintings. The Little Mermaid was on TV that evening haha!