Greetings!  I am thrilled to be back for another year of working with your awesome kids.  I am the Gifted Education teacher here at Southwest Middle School.  I work with students who have Special Education Individual Education Plans (IEPs) for Gifted Education to help them address the specific learning needs identified in their IEP goals/plans.  Much of our work takes place during the daily WIN class (for my gifted IEP'd 6th graders) or during the co-taught Applied Learning Lab elective classes (for my IEP'd 7th and 8th grade students and other self-selected 7th and 8th graders who seek above grade level challenge opportunities). I support the ELA classes of my gifted caseload students to ensure proper levels of challenge in this curriculum, as there are no accelerated paths in ELA like there are for math. I also team with general education teachers to provide a multitude of other schoolwide enrichment opportunities for the students of Southwest.

I love learning and always have!  This is the start of my 29th year of teaching, with 24 of those years being spent here at Southwest and the first five at Lawrence High School.  My hobbies include reading, traveling, practicing my Spanish, quilting, watching movies, and hanging out with my pets (cats Samwise, Gandalf, Giselle, Couscous, Minerva, and Kevin and dog Ginger).  My human kids are both heading off to college this fall; Finn will be starting his Ballet studies at Butler University in Indianapolis and Zora will continue specialization in gender studies, history, and museum studies at Mount Holyoke College in South Hadley, Massachusetts.  Go Butler Bulldogs and Mount Holyoke Lyons!  My husband, Kelly Barker, also works with the Bulldogs; he teaches 7th grade social studies here at SWMS.