The ELA Teacher Behind Print & Prosper Designs

I've spent nearly twenty years in an English Language Arts classroom. I'm still in one.

That's the whole origin of this shop, honestly. Print & Prosper didn't start as a business plan. It started because I kept wanting to wear something that said what I actually do, and everything I found had an apple on it, or a chalkboard, or some phrase about coffee and surviving until Friday.

None of it was about the books.

There's a certain kind of teacher shirt I wanted and couldn't find. Something a kid would read on a Tuesday and pause over. Something that made the work visible — not the exhaustion, the work.

So I started making them.

Every design starts in the classroom, usually in the middle of something else. A banned books display in September. A grammar joke that lands with exactly one colleague. The weather of October, when everyone is tired and the reading finally starts to take.

I write them down and figure out later whether they're a shirt.

They're printed on Comfort Colors tees because those are the ones I actually wear — garment-dyed, heavyweight, soft on arrival instead of soft after a year of washing. Sizes run through 4XL, because teachers come in every size and I'm not interested in a shop that only fits some of us.

I hold a Master's in Education and a Specialist degree in Instructional Design and Technology. 

I mention it not because a degree makes a better t-shirt, but because it's the reason I know who I'm designing for. Twenty years of watching what reaches kids and what doesn't shapes everything on these shelves.

Alongside the shirts, I write classroom resources at Technically Engaging ELA on Teachers Pay Teachers — the lesson materials that come out of the same twenty years.

→ link to TPT store

The shirts are here if you want them. If you teach this subject, I think you'll recognize a few.