Graduation a term that every high school student dreads, from the moment we start kindergarten we are asked what we want to be when we grow up, we say things like I want to be a princess, or an astronaut in my case I didn’t really have a plan. Growing up I always had a passion for children and animals. As I continued threw life my passion for children grew stronger, I started babysitting every chance I got as soon as I turned 14, as soon as I turned 16, I got a job at our local daycare working with preschoolers and had decided that I wanted to be a teacher.
After deciding that I wanted to be an educator I took into consideration the things that I adored, the life lessons I had learned along the way. I attended Queen Elizabeth school from kindergarten to grade 6 in Weyburn Saskatchewan. Q. E. was the school for the farm kids and out of town kids. From a young age my passion was always horses, growing up we owned and bred over one hundred mares and foaled them out, this gave me every opportunity to work with animals, and learn different styles and ways to go about handling young horses. In a way my animals taught me different ways to teach, I ride horses and a variety of young and old, and none of my horses rides the same or learns a new skill the same. Some were able to pick it up in a day of showing them the maneuver I wanted them to learn, and some took days even weeks to figure it out. I took this into consideration when choosing what I wanted to do with the rest of my life, I figured that if I could figure out what seemed like a million different ways to teach a thousand-pound animal that did not speak my language that I could take this and apply it to my future students.
I struggled for a very long time in school, I felt as if the school division and my teachers had failed me. They were only able to teach the kids who understood the material and the way that they learned. This is something that I have decided as a future educator that I will avoid at all costs, I want to be able to teach a variety of different learning styles and help each child reach their full potential.
I did not grow up with any of my family or close friends that were teachers, but when I moved to Kipling Saskatchewan halfway threw my grade 11 year, everyone was there to help and support me get caught up to where I needed to be in order to graduate, the school districts were very different, so I was behind in some subjects that I needed to pass in order to graduate. That’s when I learned the value of a small town where everyone knows everyone and was always willing to lend a hand to get their students to where they needed to be. I always struggled with math, from kindergarten to grade 12, it was by far my weakest subject I failed to grasp the ideas of why the heck we were learning things that we would not apply after high school. Although I was put in a separate class to get caught up suddenly, I had a math teacher who could explain things in a way that I would understand. If it weren’t for this teacher, I am not sure I would have even graduated. This teacher was my hope, she was the one who changed my mind on teachers. She taught me that not all teachers are able to adapt their teaching style to each induvial students but that those teachers to do exist. It is because of this teacher that I was able to pass math and graduate but also that gave me the shove to apply for post secondary school.
I started off my post secondary school attending the University of Brandon, and then covid hit. So, I started off my university experience with a bang (not actually) everything was moved to online, so I struggled because I am the kind of person that needs human interaction, and in person classes. I quickly realized that having the flexibility of online school meant that I was still able to work. For the first two years of my university debacle I was able to continue to babysit and to work at our local daycare, which in the end helped me to apply what I was learning into a real life setting. Fast forward two years and covid seemed to be never letting up in Manitoba, that’s when I had made the decision to make yet again another jump and transfer from the University of Brandon to the University of Regina. Now if you know anything about transferring university’s you’ll know that it set me back a bit. Having to take first year courses again was not ideal but I have stuck through it.
To say the least I have not had an easy go with the education system, but I want to take all these hard times and obstacles and put them towards being a better educator. I believe that the teachers that go through the hardest times are some of the best teachers because they have endured much more than someone who has had smooth sailing all the way through. I hope to take every lesson, every bump in the road and use those times to help get our education system back on track.
