The "Choose Your Leading Man" Challenge The Concept: The Islanders are split into couples. Each girl gets assigned an iconic BookTok hero — think Rhysand from A Court of Thorns and Roses, Jase from It Ends with Us, Cardan from The Cruel Prince, or Augustus Waters from The Fault in Our Stars. Her partner has to embody that character completely for the whole day. The Setup: Producers hand each boy a character card the night before with a full briefing personality traits, iconic lines, how he treats his love interest, mannerisms, everything. The girls don't know which character their boy got. They have to figure it out. The Challenge Itself: Each couple has to recreate an iconic scene from their assigned book, acted out in front of the whole villa. The girls only find out which book they're reenacting right before they perform. Total chaos. Total drama. The other Islanders vote on: Best performance Most convincing leading man Which couple actually had chemistry The Twist: After the performances, the girls get to "recouple" not based on who they're with, but based on which fictional character they'd most want as their Love Island partner. If your man played Rhysand and three girls pick Rhysand? Trouble. Why BookTok Would Lose Their Minds: Seeing a Love Island boy try to pull off Rhysand's brooding intensity or Augustus Waters' poetic softness? The clips would be all over TikTok within hours. The girlies would be in shambles debating who did their fave justice and who absolutely did not.

I'll be honest: I didn't always love math. Growing up, I was one of those kids who dreaded it, the one who sat in the back hoping not to be called on, convinced that math was a language spoken by other people, not me. Then I became a teacher. When I had to stand in front of students and actually explain the why behind the numbers, something shifted. I couldn't fake my way through it. I had to break it down, truly break it down, until it made sense to me first. And somewhere in that process of dismantling math piece by piece and rebuilding it from the ground up, I fell in love with it. Not the rote memorization I'd been taught, but the logic underneath. The way every step has a reason. The way it's less about answers and more about thinking. Now I bring that same approach to my 5th grade students, many of whom walk in feeling exactly the way I used to. They tell me they hate math. They've decided they're not "math people." And I understand that feeling completely, because I lived it. But by the end of the year, something remarkable happens. Kids who swore math wasn't for them, start to get it, not just the mechanics, but the confidence that comes from understanding something that once felt impossible. Catching that "I hate math" feeling so early is also so powerful. I wish someone had caught me. They leave my class saying they love math. That transformation, watching a student go from defeated to not just capable, but confident, is the most meaningful thing I do. That's why I love math now. Not despite my early struggles with it, but because of them. My past as a math-doubter is exactly what makes me the teacher my students need.

I want to build the thing I never had. I grew up in an underfunded school in an underfunded town, first-generation, with a ceiling made of whatever I could see from where I was standing. No one mapped the world out for me. No one told me that careers existed beyond the handful I could name. I cobbled together a path from what was available, and I made it work, but I never stopped thinking about the children who don't. So I became a teacher. And then I became the person I needed. In my years teaching fifth grade math, I built news stations at multiple schools, launched enrichment clubs in journalism, cooking, acting, and engineering, took students to Texas Tech to meet professionals firsthand, and brought local news anchors and industry leaders into our classrooms. Not because it was required, but because I know exactly what it costs a child to grow up without exposure to what is possible. Every field trip, every guest speaker, every child who stood inside a real newsroom and thought "I could do this" was a crack in the ceiling I grew up under. But individual programs are not enough. The systems surrounding our students and our teachers are still broken, and broken systems do not discriminate. They grind down the most dedicated teachers and overlook the most capable students, quietly and consistently, until both give up. That is what I am going to Harvard Graduate School of Education to fix. I want to build pathways. Early, intentional, well-resourced exposure to college and career options for students in underfunded communities, the kind that does not depend on whether they happen to have a teacher like me. I want to build structures that work for teachers instead of against them, that treat the people in the classroom as the experts they are. I want to build systems so strong that no child has to wait for the right person to come along before their future opens up. I am doing this while raising two children of my own, ages one and four. I will spend four nights a week away from them. I will miss t-ball practices and bedtimes and the slow, ordinary moments that add up to a childhood. I give myself the same talk every day: in two years, things will be different. The sacrifices will be worth it. I believe that, because I have to. And because the work is real. I am building a future where the child I used to be has a system behind her from the start. Where the students in my community have the same ceiling as everyone else. That is what I am building. And I am not stopping until it is done.

I became a teacher because of a child I used to know. She grew up in an underfunded school in an underfunded town, and no one ever sat her down and told her the world was bigger than what she could see. She was smart and capable and full of potential, and she spent years believing the only careers that existed were teacher, cop, lawyer, and doctor. Lawyer and doctor cost money she did not have. Cop did not call to her. So she cobbled together a path from what was left, earned a criminal justice degree, then a teaching degree, and eventually found her way into a fifth grade classroom. That child was me. I did not have a mentor who saw my potential and mapped out a future for me. I did not have enrichment programs or college visits or professionals who looked at my circumstances and showed me what was possible. I didn't have parents who knew how to navigate the world of higher education, because they had never set foot there themselves, and didn't care to learn for their own children. I had the vague, well-meaning promise that in America, anyone can be anything, without any of the infrastructure to make that true. And I have spent my entire career making sure the children in my classroom do not have to live inside that same gap between promise and reality. In my years teaching elementary and middle school math, I have built news stations at multiple schools, launched enrichment clubs exposing students to cooking and baking, journalism, acting, and engineering, taken students to visit Texas Tech University to meet professionals in those fields firsthand, and brought local news anchors and industry professionals into our schools to show my students what a career can actually look like. Not because these programs were required of me, but because I know exactly what it costs a child to grow up without them. The students I serve come from the same underfunded zip codes I came from. They are just as capable as any student anywhere. What they sometimes lack is exposure, and exposure is something I can give them. A child who has stood in a real newsroom, who has shaken hands with an engineer, who has seen someone from their own world standing inside a career they did not know existed, is a child whose ceiling just got higher. That is why I am pursuing my graduate degree at Harvard. Because the work I have done in individual classrooms and schools is meaningful, but the systems that surround those classrooms are still working against the students I serve, and against the teachers who show up for them every day. I want to build something bigger. I want to create the programs and pathways that give every underfunded school what my students and I had to fight to find. I became the person I needed when I was growing up. Now I want to build the systems that make sure no child has to wait for someone like me to come along.

There is a specific kind of guilt that only a mother returning to school understands. It is not loud. It does not announce itself. It shows up quietly, in the moment you realize you missed a t-ball practice you never would have missed before, in the four nights a week you spend away from children who have never once fallen asleep without you beside them, in the school events that appear on the calendar like small accusations. I give myself the same talk every single day: in two years, things will be different. The sacrifices will be worth it. I say it like a prayer, and like most prayers, I say it precisely because part of me is not sure I believe it yet. Returning to school as a mother of two (an almost-five-year-old and an almost-two-year-old) means constantly negotiating between the person I am trying to become and the mother I have always been. I had to step back from coaching their t-ball teams. I come home and instead of sinking into the couch for story time, I open a laptop. I am present, but divided. And the division costs something. Being a teacher by day means I give everything I have to other people's children for eight hours, then come home to fight for the energy to give to my own. The work does not stop when the school day ends, it just changes faces. And through all of it, the guilt of the moment has a way of drowning out the logic of the long game. But here is what I know, even on the hardest nights: I am not going to Harvard Graduate School of Education for myself alone. I am going because I have sat inside broken systems long enough to know exactly where they crack and exactly who falls through. I am going because the students I serve deserve better than what currently exists, and I have decided that if I want that to change, I have to be the one willing to build something different. So yes, I have missed practices. I have spent nights away from babies who still reach for me in their sleep. I have felt the full weight of what it means to choose a future over a moment, over and over again, without the comfort of certainty that it will be enough. But I am also raising two children who will one day watch their mother finish what she started. Who will see that love sometimes looks like sacrifice, and that building something better, for them, for students everywhere, is its own kind of devotion. The guilt is real. So is the reason.

If you looked at me, you might make a few assumptions. I'm covered in tattoos. Most notably, a dreamcatcher inked with Deftones lyrics across my skin, an Oscar Wilde quote, and my favorite: a bold geometric piece with my daughter's birth flower at its center. You might assume I'm someone with a high pain tolerance, someone unbothered by needles, someone a little fearless, maybe even reckless. You would be wrong. I am terrified of needles. Not a little squeamish, genuinely, deeply, irrationally terrified. Blood draws, IV lines, flu shots… no thank you. I will look away, grip the chair, and mentally leave my body entirely. And yet, somehow, I have sat through multiple tattoo sessions, voluntarily, because the needle only goes in superficially and the result is beautiful and meaningful. My brain has negotiated a very specific treaty with my fear: decorative and intentional? Fine. Medical and necessary? Absolutely not. This contradiction has gotten me into some interesting conversations, particularly when people ask why I chose to deliver both of my children at a birthing home instead of a hospital. When I explain that part of it came down to my terror of the IV line and the epidural needle, people almost always laugh and say, "So you were just too chicken to go to the hospital?" Let me be clear about what "chickening out" of a hospital birth actually looks like: it looks like unmedicated labor. Twice. My youngest is almost two, my oldest almost five; what I lovingly refer to as my "very recent trauma." I remember after my second birth, exhausted and overwhelmed, turning to my husband and saying that it was terrifying how our bodies are capable of sustaining that level of pain without shutting down entirely. He nodded sympathetically. He had not watched the birth video. He could not. So no, I was not a chicken. I was a person who made a calculated, if slightly chaotic, decision based on my specific fear and my specific threshold for what I was willing to endure and why. That, I think, is actually the most honest thing I can say about myself: my bravery is intentional, and my fears are specific. I will not let a nurse draw blood without a fight, but I will sit with ink under my skin because those tattoos mean something. The dreamcatcher is protection, something I needed badly growing up. The Oscar Wilde quote reminds me that even nightmares are a kind of dream, and surviving them matters. The geometric piece with the birth flower is for my daughter, who came into the world the hardest way I know, and who is worth every second of it. People make assumptions about who I am based on what they see: the tattoos. But the truth is almost always more layered than the surface. I am brave in the ways that matter to me, afraid of the things that feel uncontrollable, and completely at peace with the contradiction. That, more than anything else, is what makes me me.

Selflessness is not something I chose; it is something I became out of necessity. Growing up, my parents were present in name only. They moved through our home like strangers, distant and unreachable, and I learned early what it means to need someone and find no one there. That loneliness did not harden me. Instead, it became the foundation of everything I do. I promised myself that no one in my life would ever reach for support and come back empty-handed. That promise led me to teaching. Every student who walks into my classroom carries a story, and I make it my mission to learn it. I have sat with Novah, an 8th grader, after school who was failing not because she lacked ability, but because her parents were going through a very public and messy divorce. I have connected families to resources, written letters of recommendation at midnight, and shown up to events knowing I might be the only adult cheering a student on. That led me to coaching. I told my athletes I'd challenge their parents to see who was going to be their biggest cheerleader. I don't do these things for recognition. I do them because I know what it felt like to need exactly that, and to never receive it. Selflessness in teaching also means pouring into my colleagues. Early in my career, I watched talented teachers burn out and walk away because they felt unseen and unsupported. I became intentional about changing that. I have mentored new teachers, sharing lesson plans and honest conversations about the hard days, reminding them of their purpose when the weight of the job threatened to bury it. Just like Jael, whom I sat with today, and who graduates this weekend with her teaching degree. I have seen educators rediscover their passion because someone took the time to remind them why they started. Leahlynn comes to mind here, sharing transformation rooms and giving her something fun to focus on while the lessons started to stick. Outside of school, I carry this same instinct into my friendships. I have been the steady voice on the other end of the phone at two in the morning with Lindsey when breastfeeding got too hard, the one who shows up with groceries unannounced after Liz and Koby left the NICU with their newborn, Willow, the friend who listens without judgment until someone finds the courage to speak their own truth. I have watched Hailei step into her voice and advocate for herself in ways they never had before, and I believe that happened partly because she first felt safe being heard by me. As a mother, selflessness is woven into every ordinary moment. I am raising children to understand that the world does not revolve around them, that strength is measured by how you treat those who can offer you nothing in return. I model that daily, not perfectly, but consistently. I coach their soccer teams and tball teams in any free time I am allowed. I chauffeur to dance class, games, school events, practice and gymnastics without fail. Selflessness is not a sacrifice for me. It is the truest expression of who I am, shaped by the child I once was and the person I decided to become.