Personal Information

Noel, the Marksman

2007-2008 National Champion

American Legion Junior Air Rifle CompetitionColorado Springs, Olympic Training Facility, August 2007

Click here to read her personal narrative about this event.

 

To give you a little of my background, I am originally from GA and attended the University of Georgia for my undergraduate degree. I majored in math until I was a beginning senior. Now I know none of you would do this but it dawned on me that I would have to get a job in a year. I really did not want to teach math. So I changed my major to special education (a wide open field at the time). Now my parents said four year is all you get, so I doubled up on courses and actually did finish that year.

I taught a primary self-contained special education class for three year in Athens, GA and made another profound decision. I wanted to go to graduate school, but a different one. So I decided I wanted to go to the University of NC. I got a job near Chapel Hill for one year so I could get residency in the state (out-of-state tuition is high, you know!). Well, I did finish my master’s degree in several areas of special education.

Then I decided I wanted to take some courses for fun. I took all of the computer programming classes at our community college at night while I taught in public schools during the day. Soon I became Supervisor of Exceptional Education and wrote a computer program which processes all the IEP’s in the county. Believe me, the teachers loved it. However, it was my job to check all that paperwork (you know how thick those files get). In fact, I used to measure my day’s work in terms of feet. “Oh, I only have two feet of work today,” or “Whew, it’s a heavy day with five feet of work!”

Well, I did get tired of that paperwork and moved across the county line to become Director of Instructional Technology. For ten years I taught teachers, administrators, and students how to use computers. Meanwhile, I continued my education. In 1991, I completed my PhD. in curriculum and instruction. In October, 1992, I married my husband, Herald Maxwell (everyone calls him “Max”). We had a lovely daughter, Noel, on Christmas Eve of 1993.

In 1994, we got our first CAT. Now, of course, I’m not talking about a normal cat. I’m talking about two lion cubs. Oh, did I mention that my husband is a little unusual. He was a professional magician at the time (and is still quite good) and wanted to create a stage show with an anti-drug, anti-violence message. He wanted to use a large cat. A lady he met loved the idea and gave us two lion cubs. Well, we surely did not have the $250,000 for the stage show, but little did we know that these precious animals were our first rescue. They were malnourished and had terribly broken legs. We nursed them back to health and Project Noah, Inc. was born.

Check us out at www.projectnoah.com.

We moved to Bowling Green, KY in 1997 and I worked in the Computer Science department for four years before moving to the College of Education in 2001. I love teaching the Educational Technology classes here at WKU.