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My Office Accoutrements

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I was on a Zoom call recently when someone looked at my background and said “Is that real?” We were in the process of setting up, and getting our meeting started so I didn’t realize she was talking to me, so I didn’t answer. (“You talkin’ to me?!”) But I digress.

As a matter of fact, my Zoom background isn’t a background at all. It is my office. It took years to learn that others used something similar as a background. In my office I have books. Behind me (while I’m sitting here writing this) looms a large two-tier floor to ceiling bookcase, and that was what she was seeing. But that was only one wall. I have two more walls of bookcases. In fact, my home is filled with books, and books, and books. Outside my office I have more floor to ceiling bookcases, which house hundreds of my husband’s books. The ones in my office are textbooks, reference books, music scores, and books and anthologies of poetry (mostly public domain) of poems I use or have used in my music. Anything I’m currently reading in fiction, Mick Herron, Ann Cleeves, or John Sanford (you have to know that reference or you won’t get the fact that he’s a Pulitzer-prize winning reporter with over forty books); or non-fiction, Malcolm Gladwell, for example, is in my Kindle, quietly holding hundreds more books. I don’t read so much as devour. But again, I digress.

Where my office doesn’t have books I have artwork, mostly paintings by my mother, whose work I greatly admire, in oils, watercolors, or pastels. When we moved her out of her home recently, we had to deal with her office – her art room. I’ll never forget when I mentioned to my husband that my mother won “Best in Show,” he glibly shot back, “What breed did she register under?” because he knew she had a fistful of ribbons that she’d won in competitions over the years. Along with ribbons were paints, paint brushes, paintings, ideas for paintings, and books about painting. We soon realized this was part of a floating iceberg – there was more art and were more canvases squirreled away in other parts of the house! She is 91, and now living in an apartment. She went to an art class recently given at her facility but pretended not to know anything so as not to show anyone up. Very Minnesotan of her – not a surprise since she was born and raised there. But again, I digress.

I happen to be very visual – and visually pleasing things help me to write and think. Sometimes I’m not looking at something as much as staring, thinking of the words I’m trying to elicit from my sometimes-slow-as-molasses brain. On my desk is a two-foot-high sculpture which I lugged on a plane, stowed between my feet coming back from Houston. I love it and am happy I went to the trouble to get it to my very first office, and every subsequent office since.

Minnesota Nice

I have finally tucked my degrees on a wall next to the aforementioned large bookcase when I moved to Arizona, but you won’t see them front and center. They would only be slightly noticeable if you completely entered the room. So, if you just stick your head in you surely won’t see them. And on a Zoom call they’re just out of focus enough that you can’t read them either. (That’s so “Minnesota” of me. You work your buns off only to place your degrees in a spot that people “might” see, but again, they “might not.” So, that’s being very Minnesotan, understated, but still honest, a bit like my mother, an award-winning artist but not about to show up a budding volunteer art teacher who was providing the little art class to other ninety-year-olds.) Again, digressing…

Office Particulars

I, too, have a stack of legal pads – I love legal pads (but prefer other colors to yellow if I have the option) and love to write things down. It’s a mnemonic, a memory tool, and I’m an inveterate doodler as well. So, somehow between the computer, the occasionally working printer – which is virtually brand new – and my legal pads I get my work completed. They all sit happily or grumpily on my desk (depending on threatening deadlines) along with a calendar of course deadlines, which week we happen to be in, and what my students’ imminent deadlines are.

Technically I have two offices and three desks. Two desks at angles to each other, in beautiful cherry, a wood that is not currently in vogue, but I don’t care. A cherry drafting table sits downstairs and looks at me imploringly under heavy brows when I descend the staircase. It sits next to the grand piano. It used to scold me, but now we have an “understanding.” When I feel like using it – I do. First plan regarding moving in, do not dream of moving a grand piano upstairs! Very good plan. At least the piano doesn’t have an attitude.

I mentioned going through my mother’s artwork and her office. Unfortunately, there will come a time when someone has to do that for me – and my music. Hopefully I’ll get to it before then, but one never knows. There are copyrights involved so there is some consolation on getting something for their trouble. Some of my music is in the closet with extra shelving. Some of the music is in a computer on pdfs (which computer does that reside in is the real question), some hard copies in file folders based on a previous method of storage. We (my husband and I) are trying to decide the next best way to store scores, parts, and recordings that go with each piece when it needs to go out to performers or conductors. This decision came after spending Christmas Break frantically searching through several computers, other closets in other rooms which hold older pieces, not to mention downstairs near the piano, where it might have also been, in an effort to find my second string quartet and vocal chamber piece that had to be sent RIGHT NOW.

My office was better organized when I taught at Hamline University because I had a secretary and an honors student assistant. But that was many pieces ago and a different institution and state. I simply have more music, larger pieces, and need a new organizational system. But it’s the middle of the semester, I’m working on two CD projects, and helping my students with their deadlines. I’ve finally gotten a couple of these 6×6 writings under my belt, which I’ve been owing. My accoutrements are scowling a little less as I walk into the room. What I probably need for my office is an assistant or perhaps less judgmental furniture . . . but I digress.

 
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NeuroDiversity – Changing Our World

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They told her that her organs were shutting down and at some point they would have to deliver the baby – no matter what. The answer to the question was that her life was to be spared – period – but they would hold off as long as they could because it was still too early.

Each nurse greeted the woman with “You will not seize on my shift!” and the woman thought, “I didn’t even know that was an option,” lying there, the clock not ticking but jumping hours, missing parts of days until they said, “Baby’s in trouble.” It was said, back then, surgeons had less than three minutes in this situation; I’ve heard from some it’s more like 90 seconds before things can go incredibly wrong. Timing is critical.

The baby remained in the hospital for three and a half months; first in the NICU, (the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit, in an isolette) then the Special Care nursery – in an isolette without a top – now that he could regulate his temperature better. He never made it into the “regular” nursery – the one that everyone visits where they have balloons and ooh and aah over recent deliveries. “Ooh, I think she has your nose;” “No, I think he looks more like his father,” “Well, at least he doesn’t look like Aunt Edna!”

Fast forward down the road about twenty years. One of the doctors of this million dollar-March of Dimes baby (and yes, that’s probably what he cost – in 1990s dollars) mentioned that people (referring to colleges because the mother was having difficulty with the college’s Disability Services) would never know how far the boy had come because these individuals couldn’t imagine where his road had started at one pound five and one half ounces.

The starting point. . . How much one has been through and now that individual’s road with varying difficulties with sensory problems, learning, and communication issues, has led to the doorstep of a college. Speaking as a college professor, I’ve found that the colleges (and universities where I’ve taught) seem to concentrate on the doorstep. It’s easy not to admit someone, but to truly admit someone when that individual has special needs or is on the spectrum might be a better place to start on that road.

Not realizing how tremendously far an individual has come, remember, timing is critical, the obstacles overcome, the communication deficits struggled with and achieved is really where the conversation begins. The physicians know how incredibly smart that student is because of testing to the nth degree, witnessing the determination to achieve even while lying in an isolette trying simply to gain a few ounces. Remember, the next time someone shows up on your doorstep, that individual’s IQ might be equal to or higher than yours, but the road that person took may have been riddled with unbelievable obstacles and may have taken much longer to get to and through this doorstep. It won’t show in traditional ways.

“If we make it difficult, or at least, not any easier, maybe he’ll go away.” Is that how you want to be remembered – for making it difficult for someone else to learn? I’ve been surprised by unlikely sources as I witnessed this happen, but I believe we need to help people learn. I know that GCC has been very good in helping students, but I’m casting my net at a wider audience.

Dr. Temple Grandin, the gifted autistic author, scholar, and expert animal behaviorist, credits those with autism (just one of the many kinds of disabilities in our world) as the people who truly change our world through their new ideas. Think about it.

Remember the March of Dimes and Autism Awareness.

Dr. Anne Kilstofte volunteers with Silver Spur Therapeutic Riding Center of Cave Creek for children and adults with SPECIAL NEEDS and works very hard to ensure that her students’ disability needs are met in her Musicology classes at GCC. She is pictured below at a fundraiser for SSTRC with “Rhoney.”

 
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High on Learning

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When given the choice to write about AI or learning this week, I jumped at the latter. I absolutely love all things  learning. And if AI and I were in a relationship, right now we would not be speaking. I’ll look to my Write 6X6 colleagues’ posts on AI this week to help me find footing in this rapidly changing tech hellscape landscape. But back to the learning prompt:

When was the last time you learned something new? What was that like?

It’s the second question that caught my attention. Learning feels a-maz-ing. And that shouldn’t be a surprise due in part to the role of dopamine in the learning process. The human brain is attuned to novelty, and when we learn something new the reward center in our brain is activated.

For example, take this quick geography quiz:

1) Which city is farther west – Reno, NV or San Diego, CA?

2) Which city is farther north – Philadelphia, PA or Rome, Italy?

Perhaps you can remember the feel-good rush of mastering where different places are located on the globe. Geography provides unending opportunities to learn something new.

I’ve become obsessed lately with a Facebook page entitled Simon Shows You Maps.  On the page are wacky maps such as “The World According to Frank Zappa,” (who once said you can’t be a real country unless you have a beer and an airline). Another post shows the percent of people in various countries who believe in life after death. Yet another entry shows the location of various Seinfeld scenes on a map of Manhattan.

But a map that caught my attention lately is one provided by Google showing my own travel history (for as long as I’ve toted along a cell phone, at least):

Now that I have sufficiently distracted you, back to the geography quiz. San Diego is farther west, and Philadelphia is farther north, right? *Bzzzzzzzzzzzzzzt*

According to research on cognitive maps, people often use a rotation heuristic, which means we tend to see figures as more vertical or horizontal than they actually are. So, people tend to envision the coastline of California as vertical, even though it is curved:

And other research demonstrates the alignment heuristic, which is our tendency to line up two separate geographic entities. An example of the alignment heuristic is that many people place the center of the United States directly across from the center of Europe. But Philadelphia (in the northern US) sits at approximately 40 degrees north latitude, whereas Rome (in southern Europe) is actually farther north of Phili at around 42 degrees.

So how do you feel right now? If you’ve never heard of the rotation and alignment heuristics, you might feel a little glittery after-glow from the novelty/surprise of it all. Our students are just as attuned to novelty and surprise as we are. As such, injecting the new and unexpected in our lessons is a powerful way to stimulate learning.

And yes, the irony of the first paragraph of this post is not lost on me. AI is nothing if not novel, and I know I’ll get a little buzz from reading everyone’s AI posts this week. So, thanks in advance for the learner’s high!

 
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Podcast Power: Happiness

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Recently, I have started listening to podcasts by Dr. Laurie Santos titled The Happiness Lab. I have enjoyed learning how our brains are wired to remember negative experiences over positive ones and how we can find happiness in the smallest things. This podcast has not necessarily had a profound impact on my class instruction rather on myself and the kindness I have toward the human condition. 

The Happiness Lab with Dr. Laurie Santos

The Happiness Lab speaks to the stress we put on ourselves and how that stress affects our bodies and minds. I have taught future elementary educators for the past 5 years. They are some of the most dedicated learners I have ever taught. However, they are also some of the most overwhelmed and self-critical students I have encountered. 

By listening to The Happiness Lab I have learned how to create healthier habits within myself and I am sharing what I have learned with my students. My students exhibit the effects of stress and I have found myself suggesting and sharing information from the podcast. Through listening to The Happiness Lab, my desire to help my students has increased to areas outside of the course content.

 
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Yep, I Get It Now

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I was so excited to start Write 6×6 last week. I was raring to go. Ready to put pen to paper. Super excited. And then I got the writing prompt. Whaaat! A song?

What song represents your career in education, your evolution as a teacher, or your approach to student success?

Lisa

My enthusiasm was immediately crushed. I couldn’t think of a song. I mean how does Coi Leray’s “Players” have to do with my career in education? The lyrics constantly playing in my head, “Yeah, ’cause girls is players too…” Am I player? What does that mean? I can’t even think of another song, and this one is so not appropriate. Sigh.

It got me thinking though. How often do we crush our students’ enthusiasm in our classes? Does it happen on day one as Lisa did mine? Ha! Just kidding, Lisa. But truly does it happen at all? The biggest culprit I see is grades. Often with grades on those first few big assignments, a poor performance on the first few without the others in the grade book to weigh them out can be crushing. I often have students ask, how did my grade go from 95% to 72% overnight? Well, I graded something, and you didn’t do well. Crushed!

Students don’t always get the math, so seeing their grade drop drastically is not encouraging. So years ago I changed my strategy. I still crushed my students if they didn’t do well, but I introduced a policy to not only help students learn from their mistakes but also to keep them motivated and in the game. Assignments submitted on time and complete are eligible for a rewrite. They can resubmit the assignment within a week and earn a better score. Rewrites are optional, but they get feedback on the work and an opportunity to improve and learn. Canvas now makes this convenient for me to suggest rewrites with the Reassign button in Speedgrader.

I encourage them to submit a rewrite by giving them clear feedback using a rubric and comments on the assignment. Often times it’s a simple fix that students resubmit right away. Other times it’s a bit more involved. But the overall grade in the course bounced back up after a rewrite grade is entered, and hopefully, students are motivated to keep going unless, of course, they get stumped by a strange writing prompt and just give up without trying. Yep, I get it now.

Write6x6

Joy: An Evolution in Becoming a Teacher at Glendale Community College

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written by Dr. Krysten Pampel

I have been teaching since Fall of 2009 and the lyrics in Joy by Andy Grammer are a good representation of my evolution in becoming a teacher at Glendale Community College.

Joy by Andy Grammer (official audio)

I vividly remember my first year teaching and the fear that sat with me on the daily. The weight of being a teacher cannot be articulated in a preservice teacher classroom. It is something you experience when you have students show up in your classroom on the first day of classes. 

Doubt was a constant in those first years of teaching since I was building and creating curriculum with the hope that students would gain the knowledge they needed in order to be successful in the next class. This was a huge challenge and the pressure felt very high to help my students who were looking to move into STEM careers after high school were given all the tools they needed to achieve their academic goals.

In the Fall of 2011, I was accepted into a doctorate program which was a great opportunity but stretched me too thin. I felt sorrow when leaving high school was the best option for me to complete my doctorate degree and have a better balance in my life.  

As a doctorate student I had very limited access to the classroom which kept me grieving the loss of leaving the high school classroom. The ways I connected with college students was significantly different than high school students. Over the years in my doctoral program, I started to change my perspective and found joy as I got closer to finishing my dissertation. 

Pressure entered my teaching evolution when I found out I was pregnant. My due date and my dissertation completion were around the day. I also felt pressure in determining what I wanted to do for work after finishing my degree.

My husband has asked me what job I would take that would make it where I no longer taught at the community college at night. I was so struck by this question because I never realized how much I liked teaching at the community college. I knew that if I got any other job I would be in a constant state of jealousy for those working at the community college inspiring college students in the classroom. 

As I applied for a full time position at Glendale Community College, I started to get excited but was told by many current residential faculty that it was normal not to get hired the first time you interview. I went into the interview still hopeful that I would be a strong candidate for the position. After making it through all three rounds, I started to let doubt creep back in which felt shameful since I had been warned that the first time you interview you rarely get hired. 

I found joy in the June of 2017 when I received a call for Dr. Chris Miller, the mathematics department chair, offered me the job. I continued to find joy when I had my son, Olyver, at the end of September 2017 and again on November 3rd, 2012 when I defended my dissertation, successfully earning my doctorate degree. 

I have been finding more joy ever since getting a position here at GCC, through the students I teach, the colleagues I collaborate with, and the opportunities for growth I have found. 

 
empowerment, engaging students, evaluation, explain everything, faculty development, GCC, Glendale Community College, higher education, Living, Student Engagement, teachers, Teaching Ideas, We Matter, Write6x6

Can We Live Without Risks?

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A statement someone made recently jumped out at me. They said they rarely take risks. I was amazed. I consider myself a very careful person, but I often feel like my risks are the challenges I take on. Of course, I’m not talking about doing anything like this!

Perhaps it’s the definition of the word risk [enter student’s clichéd discovery of dictionary definition to make written assignment longer]. Wink

I see risk as a transition and an opportunity. Now, if the risk doesn’t have that element, I won’t do it. In some ways, we all take risks every day. There are certain risks I simply won’t consider, the consequences are just too costly.

Professionally, I was always taught to say ‘yes,’ if you want to work. People want to know that you will say ‘yes,’ when they ask. It saves time for those hiring. That’s a musician’s point of view. It’s the way you keep getting more opportunities – or, for those who prefer less formal constructs – How you get more gigs. Regrets, yes, certainly. I said ‘no’ to a really good opportunity, which was a risk, because I was just getting married (hence, already in the midst of a transition) and didn’t want to spend my honeymoon thinking about the project and risking the beginnings of our marriage… I’ll always think about where that job might have led. But see, once again, I keep going back to the positive-negative balance of risks.

And I’ll admit to some positive/negative possibilities. I’ve walked into a classroom and spoken completely ‘off the cuff,’ which is definitely a risk. It’s not that I hadn’t thought about it. I had. I know my subject deeply. Some of those have been my most inspired lectures, but occasionally, they have not. It’s a risk.

How about classroom management? I had a student who sat in the front row of class and never took a note. (This is a room that is set up as a lecture/recital hall, so down in front is noticeable.) In fact, he came in without anything – no books, no notebook, no pen/pencil or computer. Nothing. An instructor would assume he didn’t come prepared for class. And we’ve all had those students who obviously weren’t. Did I mention this was a long lecture format? The class was two hours and twenty minutes long. Should I say anything to him? He wasn’t disruptive, and he did well in the subject. One day he came in with a Rubik’s cube. I saw it, but chose not to say anything. As the lecture was finishing I just happened to look over at him. He subtly showed me his work by merely opening his hand. It was finished, and it was perfect. He hadn’t been disruptive to anyone, he didn’t show anyone else, I hadn’t been interrupted by what he was doing, but it allowed him to concentrate on what we were talking about. A risk, and a reward.

Deeper Risks

I could stop there, because it would be a great place to end – but I’m going to “risk” it and go heavy. As I mentioned earlier, we take risks every day. Driving, flying, walking down a set of stairs, saying something that you wish you hadn’t. I never discuss politics. I’ve gotten to where I rarely offer comments – especially to the entire world on any of those fronts.

But I’m going to include the world community and the risks people are facing today because we need to be talking about this in our classrooms. These are the ultimate risks because they are about basic human needs. This is not something that is happening somewhere else. It will ultimately affect us here. I was just reading an article about the fact that many Russians are also leaving their homeland, just as many Ukrainians are – except those who choose to fight. There is a general surge of people trying to survive with some semblance of their lives intact. In the article, the author referred to a family’s current residence, a shared room with three mattresses on the floor. The people had a roof, they had mattresses, a floor, running water, and they still had some money. They had been well-to-do so such living conditions would not have been acceptable in their previous life, but under the circumstances they knew they were lucky. They calculated the risk and felt they’d come out ahead considering the cost.

I first saw evidence of the collapse of the Soviet Union in the 1990s in Sweden. I ended up working with two Russian musicians as part of a Swedish quartet. There were interesting cultural flare-ups that surprised me. But like other recent mass emigrations, everyone was, and had been, fleeing for their lives. It’s amazing what we are willing to risk when we feel that we have little left to lose or too much to lose – our lives or our children’s lives.

A fountain with a person etched into it
Found at an Estonian Fountain commemorating lost lives

In Estonia, ten years after the last Russian troops slowly left, I moved there, and in my research I learned more of Stalin’s ’round up’ of people. Sometimes there were lists, sometimes just numbers. ‘Take this number of people. I don’t care who.’ They disappeared or went to gulags. Often, no one ever knew whether they were killed outright or just never seen again. How can you live with that threat? I was part of an interview team to determine whether a young Estonian man would study in the U.S. when he talked about the importance of the NATO alliance to his country. I knew about NATO. It also meant, in couched terms, the U.S., from where funding came for this prestigious scholarship. I occasionally thought about NATO – but not to the extent that this young man understood it because the Estonians had few defenses against the Russians on their shared border. We, as Americans, have the luxury of a different point of view.

Before I sign off, I want to mention that moving people, their craft, their professions, their influences, and their cultures affects everything. It affects the arts, music, the humanities, science, technology, engineering, people, and even education. Would you stay or would you go? Ultimately, when we talk about risks, these are the most critical risks to discuss. I truly believe as educators everything we do counts, but we are also lucky that we can talk about risks that are so relatively ordinary when others face risks that are so tremendously devastating.

 
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Why Die Wondering?

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GROWTH: What lessons did I learn during the past two years of the pandemic?

RISK: Maybe you took a risk and failed big, but found a silver lining? Maybe you took a risk and something wonderful came out of it? 

Leap, and the net will appear…

I just realized that the topics of GROWTH and RISK are totally embedded in my life right now. I’ve been feeling bad since I did not write a GROWTH post last week (Slacker). Now, I have the perfect opportunity to speak to both writing prompts in a meaningful, timely, soul-searching post. GROWTH and RISK.I am in the midst of intense personal growth because I took extreme personal risks. I’m sure the pandemic played a role in the timing of my fearful-yet-fearless, mid-life unraveling. Most of all, a simple question I read prompted some life-changing events in the past 6 months.

Why Die Wondering?

Another pandemic lesson…a profound one-liner: Jump, and the Net Will Appear

These two sentences hit me like a ton of bricks. Life after embracing this wake-up call has been both exhilarating and terrifying. I think two years of pandemic life pushed me to finally find my own voice and take a risk. Taking the risk- taking the leap – presented me with some long overdue opportunities for growth.

Jump and the net will appear.

I jumped. Finally. I faced huge personal issues I’ve been ignoring for over a decade. I jumped. And nets have appeared. But they are not Disney movie nets with a warm and fuzzy, happy ending. My decision to leap came with painful consequences for many people. They are not perfect nets. Perfect is the enemy of good enough. Searching for perfect plans and 100% certainty will not lead to growth. Growth requires risk. Growth happens when I’m ready to be good enough, not perfect. Growth happens after I leap and land in a new, terrifying net of possibilities and challenges. In the past, I avoided both growth and risk. Now, I’m embracing them. Some days, I can’t believe I finally jumped from my life of self-inflicted inaction into the net of new possibilities. I never imagined the pandemic could provide clarity and courage. But here I am. In the last 6 months, I’ve learned to ask myself new questions, too.

What would a brave person do? What would a confident woman do?

Obviously, we all have been changed by the pandemic. Personally, I decided not to yearn for the way things have always been. I realized I did not want to return to the status quo. The universal upset caused by the pandemic provided me with a frightening, personal call-to-action. The pandemic revealed a life-changing question: Why die wondering?  

 
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Three Positives of the Pandemic

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The negatives of the pandemic are abundant so I am going to stick to three of the positives I identified from the pandemic. 

We are stronger than we know

During the pandemic we all had a hard time. I was reminded of a TED talk I watched with my Reimagine cohort. In this talk, Ash Beckham spoke about how everyone in their lifetime experiences hardship. This resonated with me since worldwide we were experiencing hardship. I know that not only am I stronger than I know but so are students, neighbors, colleagues, friends, and strangers. There is no doubt that the pandemic has altered all of us in some capacity but I am confident that we are stronger than we know. 

TED talk shown in Reimagine – Ash Beckham

We are more inventive than we know

March 2020 put us all in a “make-it-work” situation as we prepared to go fully online to support the education of our students. This event has propelled faculty and students to new heights of innovation. We have found ways to connect with one another, learn from each other, and be more flexible when things inevitably deviate from our intended outcome. I know that I am more inventive and flexible when things fall apart in my lessons and life. I have seen people around me doing the same thing. We are more inventive than we know. 

I am more empathetic that I know

I have always struggled with the ability to empathize with students. Most of it comes from the more pessimistic outlook that I have that students are constantly trying to get out of completing the work for my courses. The outlook is bleak and gets me and my students nowhere. I have found that the pandemic has made me more empathetic in the sense that I am able to imagine how the student is feeling and thinking during times of hardship. This has helped me to implement a grace period on assignments and I weigh the students perspective on the issue they are facing before responding to them. My communication has improved through the pandemic and I know I am more empathetic because of the pandemic. 

The pandemic has been unimaginable for all of us but I hope that you (all of you) can also see how amazing we have become by living through a pandemic. 

 
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Inspired by Educated by Tara Westover

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Over Spring Break I finished reading Educated by Tara Westover. The memoir is about a young woman’s journey from her religious family to higher education. The book has several themes. There are areas that focus on identity, family, faith, education, etc. The book really resonated with me for several reasons, but the area that really resonated with me the most was the power of education in the author’s life and how it helped her to evaluate who she was and discover the woman that she is today.  Her ability to go through this process is really due to her education inside and outside of the classroom.

A huge part of my identity revolves around education. Just like the author, I was able to discover who I am and who I wanted to be in life. My parents encouraged all of their children to get an education, they believed that they were the keys to success. I thrust myself into my studies and quite a few of the lessons I learned came from inside  and outside of the classroom. As educators, we must never forget the impact the classroom has on not only our students and their profession but also who they are as an individual. The author learned a lot about herself inside and outside of school. Here are some things I learned about myself from my educational experiences:

I didn’t want to be a lawyer when I grew up. For the longest time I wanted to be a lawyer. We did a mock trial in high school and I realized, THIS IS NOT FOR ME. I played the lawyer and I choked. My heart was not in it. My heart is in teaching.

Hard work and belief go a long way. I believe I’ve mentioned this before, but I was not the best speech and debate competitor in college. I lacked confidence and some key skills. Over time I decided to up my work ethic and to really believe that I could do it. The end result, I have some championships under my belt and I’m proud of that accomplishment.

I’m a nerd and I’m proud of it. I love school, reading, studying, and watching and engaging in nerdy things like Game of Thrones. I have reaped many benefits and rewards from my nerdiness. I even include it in my lessons in the classroom.

Prayer and Coffee. Ever since high school, people have mentioned to me how they can’t believe how I get through the crazy business of life. I tell them that I get through it with a whole lot of prayer and a whole lot of coffee. Both came from my family. I grew up in a religious home and everything revolved around prayer. The coffee came from my mom, she loves it, I picked up the habit my senior year of high school and I have not let it go. Prayer and coffee are my lifeline. =>)

Life will hand you some serious lemons, make the best batch of lemonade you can, and drink a giant big gulp cup of it in front of life. I’ve drunk several big gulp cups of lemonade in front of life. I’ve done my best to make the best lemonade from some sour lemons in life. I’ve had uncertainty and struggles with school, work, and health, but I’m thankful that lemonade has come from that. I’m grateful.

The lessons learned are only a small portion of the things that have shaped me. All of the lessons learned, just like the author in Educated, have contributed to who I am today, and I wouldn’t change it for anything.