29 November 2012

Edu-Views: My Story


Note: This is the first post in a new series I am starting called Edu-views. This series will include interviews of people, educators and non-educators, discussing how their education affected their chosen career.

Every educator has a story of how they came into the profession. This is mine.

May 2000 - High School Diploma
May 2004 - Dixie State College of Utah (DSC) - Associate of Science, Pre-Business Emphasis
May 2008 - DSC - Bachelor of Science in Elementary Education, ESL Endorsement
May 2012 - Southern Utah University - Master of Education, Educational Technology Endorsement

The above seems almost normal except for the long spacing between HS Diploma and BS in Elem Ed. First off, I attended DSC for a year after HS before serving a 2-year mission for my church. After returning from the mission, I continued towards a Business degree so I could take over my family's floral business. In the process, I married a beautiful woman in May 2005 and started a new adventure. A month after getting married, my maternal grandfather died in June 2005. This death really shook me as I was very close to my grandfather. I had spent my whole life living close to him and my grandmother, they started the family flower shop.

A couple of weeks after his passing I had the first of 4 or 5 dreams that all revolved around the same theme and merely got more and more detailed. That first dream, I was in the front of a room filled with children, was merely the start and I woke up in sweats thinking I had just had a nightmare! Over the course of a week or two, the dream repeated 3 or 4 more times, each adding more and more detail until after the final dream I woke up and wrote the following:
"I have been thinking a lot about teaching as a profession tonight. I don't exactly know why, but I haven't stopped thinking about it. Not just any sort of teaching, but teaching Elementary or Seminary. This is not the 1st time this has happened, but maybe I should look into a Major change, possibly with Business or CIT as a Minor or something.
Maybe Cameo really isn't for me after all? It's like I want to truly change the way learning happens, so that it's fun. I want to help children to learn and understand that it's cool to be smart." - Summer 2005
Shortly after writing the above statement, I looked into changing my Major and started working towards my Elementary Education degree that following Fall Semester, Fall 2005. I don't know exactly why I needed to make that change in my life, but I made it and am mostly happy with the decision.

That Fall semester was a little crazy because I was taking 2 Education pre-requisites, 2 Business requirements, 2 Computer Science courses, and 1 Religious Studies class designed around teaching teenagers; I was all over the campus and my mind was everywhere. It was during that semester that I realized just how much I wanted to get involved with education and "change the way learning happens."

That Spring I took another hodge-podge of coursework and then the following Fall semester I hit the ground running as an Education major. Since graduating with my BS in Elem Ed, I made the decision I would also continue with my educational goals and earn at least one Master degree and eventually work towards the completion of a PhD in Education as well. I am in my 5th year teaching and have completed my first Master degree and look forward to completing my Administration License in the next couple of years. I feel as an educator, I need to set an example to my students that higher education is an attainable goal. As educators we try to teach our students to be lifelong Learners and that is exactly what I am trying to be.


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