KaitlynGrantTellStep2

I remember being a little girl and loving school. I’d jump out of bed in the morning, excited to go to school and learn. I was that kid that would volunteer to help with everything. Sometimes I’d even want to stay inside during recess to help the teacher with bulletin boards. It made me feel special, like I was a little teacher too. It meant the world to me to go to school every day. I knew my routine and what made me happy there. So I remember every year on the last day of school, when all the other kids would cheer and smile and be excited to start summer, I’d be sitting with tears in my eyes. For some reason the two months of summer felt like an eternity to me. I’d go home from school on that half day and spend it sitting on the couch, like a depressed little girl. No one understood, but me, why school could be so appealing to kids, why it’s so hard to do something for 180 days and then just stop. I didn’t want to wake up every summer morning with nothing to do. I wanted to learn about the planets and simple machines. I wanted to read The Magic Tree House books at school and run around in gym class. Even at the young age that we are in elementary school, I loved learning. After growing up, the thing I learned was all that time I sat sad after school let out, I could have been getting an education from the things around me. I didn’t really learn this until I got older, and didn’t completely see it until I hit college.

This past summer, I spent 5 weeks volunteering in the Dominican Republic. It was the most eye opening experience of my life. I worked with people of all ages, learning about their country and the way they go about doing things. To a person who is close minded, they would say that people in the Dominican are uneducated because they can’t all read and write but from my experience I would say that some of them are more educated than me or anyone I know. I remember one exact moment, I was helping to build a recreation center for the people in the community. I was working alongside two brothers who were teaching all of us how to take cinder blocks and cement and make walls, while leaving room for windows etc. I was so amazed at how well they could work with their hands and I asked them who taught them how to build, and mix concrete with no machines, and bend rebar etc. They looked at me like I was crazy, like how would I not know how to do these things. It was then that I began to realize that these people are just educated in different ways than me. They know how to manipulate their environment to create what they need. They know how to build with their hands and endure long hours of labor. They may not know how to read a text book and they may not know multiple languages, but they can do so much more than I ever would have imagined. I was fascinated and excited to be able to learn it all.

As I get older, it is my dream to one day travel the world like I did during college. I want to be able to be a teacher abroad and learn about the differences in their education as compared to my own. I know that people learn differently all over the world and in different countries, different things are pushed as being important in education. I think that a way for me to continue my education without actually being in a classroom setting. It would be a way to learn through the people and experiences around me.

Here is a picture (artifact) of the postcards that I began collecting as a young girl. I think they show where I hope to go in the future, and how I am interested in learning about the places in the pictures. It shows how important it is to me to further my education on other cultures and people.