beginnings and introductions

Welcome to English 101!

The first blog prompt is as follows:

Write a paragraph introducing yourself to your blogging circle. Who are you? Where do you come from? What should they know about you - about your writing? your interests? your scholarly attitude?
Post a picture of yourself for the blogging circle. If you prefer to post no picture of yourself, that's okay. Instead, post a picture of something that you think represents you. I want you to figure out how to post a picture either way, for future posts.

Here's my post -

I'm Rachel. Please call me Rachel. Don't call me Miss Sanchez, Mrs. Sanchez, Professor Sanchez, Instructor Sanchez, or any permutation of the kind. One student last semester liked to call me Miss Rachel, and I really didn't even like that. Rachel is my name, and I'd prefer to be called that. I won't call you by your last name (unless, of course, you ask me to).
Last spring, I finished my MA here at WSU. I was also an undergraduate at this university, although I transferred in as a junior from The Evergreen State College in Olympia, WA.
I really love teaching, and this summer I'll even teach a little class for Cougar Quest, which is a camp for middle and high school students interested in college. I am a first-generation college graduate (and even student, really), so helping people succeed in a place like this is really important to me. I know that it can be difficult to navigate your way through these kinds of institutions - they can feel like they're all about business and money - but it doesn't have to be that way. You can make this time here your own, and get what you want, although it does take a certain amount of work.
Hm...what else. If you haven't taken your GenEds yet, I recommend taking them in the summer. They feel like real classes then, and they're actually interesting. That's what happens when you have a class of 30, instead of 150. Also, I liked Hines for 111, but everybody knows that. I had Habib for 110, and he was a good, solid professor as well. That's pretty much the end of my freshman experience, since I transferred.
English 101 really isn't as bad as it might seem. I hope you'll take a leap of faith with me and go with what I have planned this semester. I think it might turn out alright, in the end.
I often feel scattered and I think it probably manifests itself in this way, if my face could actually do what my computer's photo booth lets it do.