Who are you?
I am a problem solver. I am a teacher. I am a daughter, a sister, a wife and a mother. Most of all, I am a student. I love to read and watch movies. I like to talk to people about the books I’ve read and the movies I’ve seen. I like understanding how things work–together and apart. I like seeing the big picture and I like seeing how all of the little parts work together. I like proving to myself that I can do things that are difficult but I love helping others do things they didn’t think they were capable of doing even more. I like to knit and crochet because it was something that I taught myself and I’m really good at it. I like to paint and make jewelry. I love spending time with my boys during quarantine. I like to cook and I spent the summer teaching myself how to use a charcoal grill and smoker. I like to talk and learn about my family and where I come from, but politics is never a good topic of conversation when it comes to my family. I am impatient but I’ve learned how to stop and smell the roses. I am who I wanted to be when I grow up.
How will I change the world?
I will change the world by helping people understand themselves, each other and the world around them. By using my skills as an educator, I believe that I will be able to teach others how to help difficult minds to learn. Everyone has a story, something that makes their life difficult, wonderful, challenging and spectacular. I hope to change the world by making people curious about the reality of others instead of scared. People tend to fear the unknown and fear causes people to withdraw into themselves and cut out all others. With education, it is my hope that I will be able to use technology to make the world a much smaller place. People can’t have empathy for others until they have empathy for themselves.
What do you want your epitaph to read?
The older I get, the more difficult this question gets. When I’m gone, when people think of me, I want them to think of the punchline of the funniest joke they’ve ever heard because they heard it from me. When they hear someone mention Manifest Destiny or The Secret, I want them to think of me. When they talk about the Power of Positive thinking or being in your Element, I want them to smile and think of me. When my children are reading a story to their children (hopefully I’ll still be here) I want them to think about me and smile. I don’t know about my epitaph, but I want my legacy to be generations of “weird”, “special”, “gifted” individuals who were able to live their dream because their teachers knew how to reach them using the Nester Protocol–identifying a student’s passion/interest (art, music, sports, computer games) and using that to teach a multidisciplinary curriculum. Understanding a student’s story because that is what will drive their learning. Encouraging.
