Hello!  I am Anna Huber McBride, an average girl in love with chocolate and chilling in the Logan outdoors.  I am an English major, so it shouldn't be any shock that I like to write and love to read, and that I was one of those kids in elementary school who got in trouble for having her nose in a book.  I play the piano and attempt the organ, and I like music of all genres, although my current fascination is Russian rap.  I'm a full-time student and have most recently worked on a vegetable farm and as a English/Stats tutor for the Athletic department at USU.  The rest of my life is fairly ordinary and uninteresting (excluding my wonderful husband), so I like to liven things up with fishing, a good hike or occasional hula-hooping session.  Chocolate milk and reruns of "The Andy Griffith Show" never hurt anyone either.

When I tell people I want to teach high school English, I rarely get much of a response.   To many, English is a class full of formidable gerunds and jargon and hours of floundering around in an emotional, bewildering sea of poetic jumble that your teacher insists is a figurative expression of the meaning of life, possible political anarchy, and the speaker’s deceased Labradoodle.  Occasionally, English class feels like that to me too, plus or minus a few diagramed sentences and arguments over the intentional use of iambic trimeter.  Yet it is so much more. 

                I have always been a lover of words, of meanings, of the intricate complexities of how we say things and why we say them.  Expression, the ability to speak, to write, to form meaning out of pure impressionistic thought, changes everything.  It is the power to bring into the world ideas that could only exist otherwise, existing without use or direction, dying with the death of a single individual. Language is a magic too-often taken for granted, a magic that preserves and binds, as well as liberates and, at times, destroys.

                Reading, both of fiction and informational texts, is a way to enter the perceptions of others, and collect the infinite volumes of information the world holds.  Writing is a way to turn pieces of mind and soul into a decodable thing, a way for others to acknowledge our unique experience and view.  Ideally, English class teaches how to access the English language preserved in text.  It is the basis of accessing all other disciplines. 

                It is this exchange of ideas, along with the pure pleasure of learning (and yes, I include learning the lives of fictional characters as learning), that draws me to English.  By teaching English, I hope to communicate part of the greatness expertise in a language brings, both a greatness of available information and the great responsibility that comes with that information.

Idealistic, and perhaps even a bit sentimental?  Absolutely. 

Impossible?  Absolutely not.