My first teaching job was at Indiana University-Bloomington in the Fall of 1994. I had just graduated from Prairie View A&M University with a BA in Geography and had been accepted as a Graduate Assistant in the Geography Department at IU. I was given Meteorology Labs as an assignment and, for the next year, that is what I taught.

By the time I got married in 1997, I was finished with all of my Master’s level environmental geography courses and had been upgraded from teaching labs to full classes, including Introduction to Geography, Introduction to Physical Geography and World Regional Geography. I went to work for a Think Tank at a commuter college, Indiana University Purdue Iniversity Indianapolis (IUPUI), called the Polis Center in 1996, where I was a GIS Analyst. I taught evening classes in World Regional and Intro to Human Geography during that time as well.

I took a job with the Convergent Group in 1998 and worked for the City of Indianapolis for a short while as a GIS Analyst – where I was actually teaching city workers how to use GIS as the city transitioned to the new technology – before ending 2 years of commuting to work in Bloomington for what was then a small, online publishing company known as 1stBooks Library in 1999, where I learned how to make a book from the rooter to the tooter. 1stBooks is now Authorhouse, one of if not the largest online self-publishing companies in the world. I also published my speculative fiction novel “Temple of the Sky” and a collection of essays and poetry, “Black Hole Soul”, while working there.

I stayed there for a couple of years before moving down to Charlotte, North Carolina in 2001 to co-found an Afrocentric publishing house called Conquering Books. We published original content for over a year before shutting down operations, at which point I moved my family to San Marcos, TX to join the PhD program at the newly-minted Texas State University (formerly Southwest Texas State University) in 2003.

At Texas State, I was a Research Assistant and Teacher of Record and, again, taught every introductory geography class the university had. I taught classes until 2007, at which point I left Texas State “All But Dissertation” (ABD) and went to teach full-time at Northwest Vista College in San Antonio where I again taught World Regional and Introduction to Geography courses until 2009.

Those courses were the last I taught at the post-secondary level. In total, I taught at the college/university level as a Teacher of Record, Associate Instructor and Adjunct for 14 years while pursuing graduate degrees in Geography and working geography-related jobs.