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Welcome and About Us

Welcome to Wandering the Halls of Academia - Teaching and Living Today!

Suzanne and Matthew, December 2019


This Blog is about teaching, classroom tips, and living a balanced life of meaning! We will be posting about practices, travel, and products we make for the classroom. Additionally, we will discuss products from other teacher authors. Matthew will be writing and posting some of our posts, while Suzanne will be creating others. We will also have guest bloggers from time to time, and links to other blogs we like or feel you may find interesting!

Matthew is a Middle School ELA teacher, leads Professional Development sessions in Positive Behavior Intervention and Support (PBIS), the integration of online educational platforms in the classroom, and classroom management/CHAMPS. Suzanne has been a substitute teacher, an interventionist in Math and SPED, and holds a degree in Animal Science, with an emphasis on genetics. We are both teacher-authors of educational products as well. We met when they were attending Middle Tennessee State University (MTSU - Go Blue!) as non-traditional students in our 40s, where we each earned their BS (Suzanne in Animal Science, and Matthew in Liberal Studies). Suzanne then went on to graduate school at Texas A&M, while Matthew took a position in Jackson, MS. We married two years later, and Matthew moved to Texas. Matthew earned his MEd in Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages (TESOL) from Grand Canyon University in 2017. Between us, we have 4 daughters, 2 sons, and 13 grandchildren! Prior to our attending MTSU, Matthew had been in the military for a decade, a private investigator with the courts in New York and Pennsylvania for five years, and then was a truck driver, trainer, and owner-operator for another 10. Suzanne, at this time, was busy raising a family while working in customer service in both the medical and consumer retail fields.

We created ELA in Middle School initially as a storefront on Teachers Pay Teachers on December 31, 2018, and we have expanded our online presence with our storefronts on The Wheel Edu and Amped Up Learning in January 2020. We create educational products for teachers and students, with an emphasis on ELA and Middle School (shocker, right?), Classroom Management with CHAMPS and PBIS, and on materials that we modify for our homeschooled grandchildren in the elementary grades (4 of them live with us...).

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