Krista Fay Hooks

Cultural Autobiography
EDMU 205, Section 6
Due: 04/29/2015

Written By:
Krista Fay Hook

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Introduction
As a species, we are as different as we are similar. Our differences are what make us unique
and beautiful. These differences are how our world has advanced as far as we have gotten and
caused all the troubles and triumphs our world has endured. Our differences define who we are,
what we are, and how we live our lives. It is the deciding factor between taking one path in life
over another. We are the result of our experiences and it is our own destiny we are writing, not
someone elses.
So when we talk about differences, there tends to be a great deal of emotion involved. This is
mostly because the differences that are in each of us are intimate and essential to the person deep
within ourselves, our most true version of ourselves. A major argument for negating conformity
and allowing individuality to flourish is that if we cannot be or not allowed to be who we are,
then we are living a life not our own, a lie some would say. If we do not stay true to ourselves it
can be argued that no one else will really know us. They will not love the real person that we are,
making the lie we are living produce relationships and loves that are as much of a lie as our life
is.
There have been many movements throughout the years to enforce the human right to be free
to be ourselves. We must enforce this right because one common mistake many people make
when dealing with differences they see in others. They see someone living life in a way they do
not agree with and try to impose their own approved or appropriate lives on them. They forget
that their living the life they want to live, others should be afforded that same right. As long as no

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one is being hurt or mistreated and if the result is happiness and completion of their being, then
they should have the right to live that way. What is the point in trying to convert a person into a
way of life when the result will be disingenuous and stripping away pieces of a unique person to
fit into a cookie-cutter life? People are allowed to disagree, it is what makes our lives challenged
and make us strive to do more and overcome odds. Without that challenge and diverse
environment, it is possible we could fall into stagnation. One persons pious contributions to their
faith could be an insult to anothers inner sense of righteousness. There is a line, a difference,
between believing someone is living a life that is against your own personal belief and trying to
make them change to live your version of life.
We were put on this Earth to live the lives we were given and to propagate the human race in
the best way we know how. It is our path, our body, our minds, our souls and our life which we
must live ourself, no one else will do it for us. We cannot control everything that can or will
happen to us in our lives, but we can control how we react to it and what we do next. Life is so
precious because we can be ourselves and make our life our own, because we can work together
but be own part of the puzzle. We are born unique.
What makes us Unique?
There are a lot of things that can categorize a person and therefore each one can make
someone categorically different and unique. The major categories are usually surrounding race,
religion, creed and so on, the list could go on for quite some time. I have always been amongst
the diverse not only professionally, but also personally. After all of the different people I have
met and the people who seem similar to myself, I have found that we are all fundamentally and
deeply different and thus experience life and make choices based upon those very differences.

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There is a quote from a cinema director named Joss Whedon who tried to explain a TV show
he wrote/directed called Firefly. He described Firefly and the movie that followed, Serenity, as a
story about, nine people looking into the blackness of space and seeing nine different things. I
feel as though this is a great way to look at people. We are all, in our essence, different and
unique in our lifes experiences and reactions to those experiences. These differences drive my
life. We are indeed all different people and not only is that ok, but that makes the world a
beautiful place.
I find myself different from my classmates, future teachers like myself, especially in my way
of thinking on the important topics. Though we come from similar areas of the country, our
backgrounds are diverse and it has made our lives equally different. Tolerance and acceptance
are often confused with the words right and wrong. They are accepting of what is right and
begrudgingly tolerant of what is considered wrong. My view, however, concerns accepting
everyone for who they are and tolerating the people who wish to impose their beliefs on others. It
would be hypocritical of me to not accept everyone and then judge those who think they are
helping.
Religion itself is a complicated subject and my own personal beliefs stem from my moms
relatively liberal beliefs and my own experiences in life. I find myself relying on facts and seeing
the world through my own point of view, my own internal filter. We all do this in some way.
However, I also am deeply concerned for my spiritual wellbeing and am constantly seeking
balance between my lifes choices and my lifes desires. I find myself different from my
classmates the most by having a different religious view than would be considered conventional.
I do not shun the Bible for perceived inaccuracies like many of the scientific community are
thought to do, but follow the line between knowing only God could have created the beautiful

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universe I study every day in Physics and knowing the Bible is vague on how he created
everything. For the most part, I assume God didnt get into the physics of it when he told the
story of how the Earth was formed to humans because in ancient times so that it could slowly be
revealed in our own time. All good things take time. This belief is actually shared by most of the
scientific community. I have met only one person who studied science and did not in some way
believe in a higher being or beings and that particular person wasnt a very good scientist.
Whether those two things are related, I am not sure.
I do find similarities in every person I have met. The similarities are what I latch on to in
order to better discover our differences and learn from them. I love learning about people and
how they live day to day both professionally and personally.
Background
Who am I then? I suppose there are a few things that helped shape my personality. As a child I
was always happy and bouncy. As I grew older, as often happens, I became a great deal more
even in my temperament and walked a path which included both the physical trials of sports and
the mental tests of academic success. School has been in my life since the very start, having the
ability to read at a 3rd grade level when I entered kindergarten, able to write my own short stories
not too long after that, and never struggling with any of my school subjects.
I have played sports since I could basically walk, starting with basketball and baseball in
elementary to volleyball in middle school. Then I played soccer for a year after being cut from
the softball team in high school freshmen year. After that, I decided academic teams, such as the
Math and Science Team, were more my speed and entered into the very strange academic sports
world. I chose the words sports world with a cringe since academic achievement is hardly

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physical, which is a key component in anything classified as a sport in my opinion. However, I

digress.
These endeavors were often not cheap and though I tried to convince my mom to not want me
to do well in sports, since they were expensive, she insisted it was important for me to
experience. She had taken care of most of her own sports equipment she had used 30 years
before me, making the sports I played not as expensive as it could have been. This was important
since most of my childhood was spent in the below-poverty line social class, during which
money was something we struggled with. Until my mom got her job with the state of Indiana, we
lived paycheck to paycheck and accumulated some debt.
When I was 13, however, my mom got her state job and we entered into what I would
consider the lower-middle class. We werent well off, but my mom and I had a good home and
were off support programs to put food on the table. We had moved to a new city and with it came
a great deal of changes, including more money in our bank account and our debts being slowly
erased. This helped also pay for expensive softball and soccer tournaments I went on until
freshmen year in high school and then the academic tournaments until I graduated high school.
After graduating from undergraduate school at the age of 22 to live with my boyfriend, and
now husband, I reentered the lower-class of society. Despite my husband having 2 jobs and I
having 1-2 jobs, usually temp jobs, we struggled to keep ourselves supported and for a year had
gone on food stamps. Neither of us seemed to be able to find work with our degrees, both of us
holding B.S. in Physics degrees from Ball State. Despite these life troubles, we had a roof over
our head and three dogs who loved us to pieces after we rescued them from terrible housing
situations. Thor, our black lab, was very abused by a farmer and was rescued as a puppy and then
given away at a local pet shop to a good home. Spazzy, our eldest black dachshund, we

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personally rescued from a disgusting house where many of her brothers and sisters lived inside,
never seeing the daylight or being cleaned up after, for their whole lives.
Since we rescued Spazzy from that home, we took in one of her younger sisters, Ninja. After
seeing the situation there had gotten even worse, despite our own finical troubles, we took it
upon ourselves to liberate the dogs we could from the house. The owner was a family member of
my husbands and though he hid four of the dogs from us, we rescued nine and took them to a vet
in Fort Wayne for her to help medically before giving them good homes. We hope to someday
convince him to let the other four dogs go to good homes instead of continuing to live in that
disgusting house. It is a struggle we are dealing with even today.
Now I am married and working on my masters, my husband and I still struggle with the bills
occasionally, but we are in a good place finically. Our debt has slowly been taken care of, except
for an enormous school loan bill each. We are also living in an apartment which not only has heat
on demand but also has air-conditioning.
Early Family Life
My childhood memories are dotted with good memories of fun times and adventures with my
mom as well as a few memories which involve physical or mental abuse from my mom. When
she became pregnant with me her life changed for the better in a lot of ways. However, being a
white, single mother in her mid-thirties living in a part of Indiana where being a Christian single
woman with a child was looked down on, my mom struggled. She has always been extremely
grateful for my coming into her life, something that perhaps saved her from a great deal of
depression she had been going through at the time in her life. However, her life had its bumps,
the community she had grown up in was less than kind about her deciding to keep me, and she
was not always able to handle the difficulties she experienced in a healthy way.

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My mom suffers from bipolar disorder, a condition which has gone untreated her whole life,
despite being diagnosed with it many times. This has made my life interesting and full of
contradictions. Some days I would be a perfect daughter and perfect student, treated to steak
dinners for my big tests and snuggles when I was bullied at school. Other days I would be
everything that is wrong with society and that I am an utter disappointment, deserving of the
mistreatment of my classmates and the bruises she herself gave me. Though I tried to understand
why my mom felt this way, my mom never seemed capable of explaining, only hitting and
yelling.
This makes her seem like a terrible person, but I do not think she is. I know there are things
she should have never done, but as I struggled in my own life I realized that some things are just
out of our control. Life goes on. I knew that the only way for my life to continue on was to
forgive and remain strong. She is the only mom I will ever have and I am not sure what I would
have been like having gone through the things she had to endure.
Her intentions were always good though, she wanted to see me become my best and do my
best. My mom enjoyed the small things in life and showed this mentality in practice by doing her
best no matter the situation. She wanted what she thought was best for me and did everything in
her power to make it happen, often being creative with her solutions since we had no money. I
cannot imagine being a single parent with no family for support. It cannot have been easy, but
she raised me the only way she knew how. Deep down she is a loving person, full of Gods
teachings and a healthy outlook on life in general. It has been these deeper inner qualities that
have gotten her through the past eight years battling bladder cancer. As I am writing this
autobiography, my husband and I are with my mom at the Cancer of America in Zion, IL, north
of Chicago, where she undergoing testing for her surgery May 1st, 2015 to have her bladder

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removed and replaced with a stoma and bag. If all goes well, I will continue working on a
healthier relationship with my mom which involves more understanding and love.
Friendships
Friendship has been a tricky subject for much of my life. I was never an outcast but I was
never a popular kid either. I was a loner in school. If I wasnt being bullied and chased down
hallways for looking at someone in the wrong way, I found myself sitting alone and being the
quite presence in the classroom who didnt need much help succeeding. One of my teachers, I
remember described me as a self-maintained student. I did have friends, but they were hardly
worthy of the term. Many of them I interacted over short periods of time, a few months to a
school year, after which they would find themselves in a different social group and I was left
behind. These kinds of occurrences at first hurt, but as I got older it happened less and less as I
took fewer and fewer chances with friendships.
It wasnt until I went to college that I truly found my element, as was often promised by
teachers and my mom. There I met liked minded people from all across America and even the
world. There are many of them who I still talk to this day and who always remember to ask about
my life, how it is going, and where I am going with my career. They are all teachers in some
fashion and are the ones who sparked the first embers of my desire to become a teacher.
They were the first people I found in my life who cared about me as much as I cared about
them. I found myself, who I am, in college and it was someone people generally liked and
trusted. Some of these friends I met in the dorms or classes. They helped shape me primarily into
the person I am today. They were open and caring, helping each other and having fun without
getting wild or out of hand. Not all of them were the best of students, making their college
education less than productive, but they were good people with good hearts. They showed me

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being myself was more important than trying to stay out of the way or being in the background. I
was worth more than what I could contribute and I was important to them, even if I wasnt
important to anyone else. We were, and are, a family.
These friends helped me become capable of more life-long friendships later in my life,
including the friends I have come to know from the Physics department and the three physics
internships I have been in. In the Physics Department, a group of graduate students go through
their degrees as a unit, taking the same classes together and encouraged to study and work
together on homework and labs. It is part of our education to teach us the level of collaboration
we are expected to do when we become professional scientists and it also tends to foster intense
friendships.
The Physics Department also tends to be highly diverse in nationalities, some of the students
coming from places such as China, Ghana, Denmark, Pakistan, Iraq, Sri Lanka, Russia, and
Brazil. Many students I have met at scientific conferences and who I have befriended and done
research with come from even more places like Holland, the Philippines, Japan, South Korea,
Southern Australia, France, Canada, England and more, not just America. I have celebrated,
participated, and been exposed to so many different religions, cultures, and foods, I cannot list
them all. I sometimes feel as though my friends have taken me on a long distance tour of their
home country from all the talks we have had and the foods they have prepared for me.
Most of the religions I have learned about from followers of their faith have shown me more
and more that all religions are beautiful and have a common core belief. This core belief is to
treat others with respect and to love God or gods. I sometimes enter into conversations with
friends about how they practice, such as the witch coven my friend Melissa is in, or have deep
Christian conversations with a friend of mine Dave on a variety of subjects. I have gone through

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a traditional Hanukkah dinner many times with my friend Summer and her mom and participated
in traditional Japanese wedding for Jennifer and attended many Catholic weddings for several
friends. I also love to listen to the stories and cultures of people from different countries other
than my own. Europe is especially fascinating to me. There are so many different languages,
peoples, and religions all jammed packed into an area smaller than the United States. When they
talk about other countries people in Europe almost talk about each other and themselves much
like someone from Indiana might refer to someone from Kentucky, sometimes in a good way and
sometimes in a bad way.
A great example of the diversity I have experienced was with my very good friend in the
Physics Department, Priscilla Asigbee. Priscilla is an international student from Ghana, Africa
and I have known her now for nearly three years. She and I often worked together to do our
homework and lab reports in the classes we shared and our approaches were often very different.
To her, working from the theory and reaching the problems scope was a method she had learned
in her undergraduate in Africa. My approach was driven from the known of the problems and
working up towards how it matched with theory, a method I had learned from my own
undergraduate here at Ball State. Together, even though we were approaching the problem in
different ways, we found ourselves meeting in the middle and discovering flaws in our
derivations or logic based on our own point of view. Our differences not only benefited us as
students but also as scientists.
Priscilla and I learned a great deal from each other as well in our personal lives. I helped her
understand American nuances and how to manage without the support of family. In her country,
family is extremely important and her cousin, whom she called sister, was often away for
business. In a way, I have become a surrogate family for her now that she is in America and try

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to keep up with her as she attempts to find work in Chicago. She, in turn, loved sharing her
culture with me and one of the most important events to her on campus was the Taste of Africa
Banquet held once a year. I was nervous at first because I did not know any of her friends and
associates she knew because of the African Student Club, but I went with her to experience her
country in the only way possible. I quickly found that the foods her countrymen eat varied nearly
as much as the countries the students represented from Africa and though I couldnt handle all of
the spices, there were some things I tried that I actually loved, including fried bananas.
Another friend of mine from the Physics Department also touched my life and helped me see
a new side to things. Zhe Kan, an international student from China who also recently graduated
Ball States Physics Department, has been and always will be a dear friend of mine. Like
Priscilla, he and I often studied and worked homework together. He also treated us for Chinese
New Year last year a traditional Chinese dinner at our home, completely made from traditional
ingredients. It was a great honor to share with him his nations holiday. He has a wonderfully
massive intellect and mathematical genius on top of being very rooted in his culture. He
impressed the professors of the department so much that they said to him during his dissertation
that they wished they could award him his Ph.D. for his thesis work instead of just a Masters. I
was devastated when he told me that he could not get into any of the American jobs he had
applied to in order to stay in America. How did no one accept him?
He explained to me that in order for him to work in the United States, the employer has to pay
a fine to hire a non-American and also has to then justify to the American government why
American applicants were not as qualified as him, a Chinese national. I was shocked that
America would be so strict on foreign workers, despite his desire to become an American citizen.
He was forced to leave the country after two months of no success at getting a job and no time to

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apply for a Ph.D. program. He is now in China, unable to afford the trip back and working to
support his family at his familys restaurant. He does not know when or if he will ever be able to
return to the field of Physics and get a job doing his dream.
I also have a diverse online friendship network, largely based around multiplayer online
games on European servers who play from almost all of the European countries and some Asian
countries, such as Russia and Japan. I am a huge gamer and the people who play are often my
age and going through similar things in life as I am. These friendships are different from ones I
have in person, but I get to know them as much as I can. We speak over a voice program on our
computers as we play the game together and are held together as a group in much the same way
my offline friendships are, working towards common goals and believing in similar ideas in our
offline lives and in our game. They often like teasing me on my pronunciation of the English
language as well, especially my friends who live in England. I tease them back about the
American Revolution. I feel as though it ends up being an even conversation.
Current Family Life
As I have mentioned before, I am married with three furry children, my dogs, and no human
children. Married life is much like I suspected it would be. We like many of the same things and
we feel the same about almost all important debates rocking our world today. We are
companions, with occasional flare ups of disagreement as any healthy relationship should have.
It is our belief that if we dont disagree occasionally, someone is not being completely open with
the other. My husband and I feel about many of lifes important issues the same way as well,
except for perhaps the debate on if Pluto is or isnt a planet. Of course, the correct answer is
Pluto is not a planet, but I let him have his fantasy Pluto is. Compromise is important in a
marriage after all.

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Unfortunately for him, he also suffers from bipolar disorder, complicated by diabetes and
blood pressure issues. For him, he struggles keeping himself from imploding on himself when
things are rough, making our relationship tense at times. He is extremely hard on himself,
something I think his very abusive mother taught him to do to himself. Many of the things I
learned dealing with my own mom I use when dealing with one of his low-times. He had a rough
start to life, much of which was far more unpleasant than my own, and we have found a balance
between his needs and my own during those situations. I have learned a great deal from him
when it comes to having patience and acceptance that I did not learn from my mother, including
the understanding that sometimes fixing something right away will occasionally make things
worse.
It reminds me of a story one of my education professors told us about a principal and how he
dealt with discipline. Instead of getting the information and dealing out punishment immediately,
the principal allowed tempers to cool and the situation to defuse before discussing the situation at
all. He would often leave the student in a room on his or her own until they were calm enough to
talk evenly. This not only gave the student time to calm down and word themselves more
appropriately, but taught them being calm will get them what they want faster than being angry,
an important lesson teens are often in need of learning at that age.
This is an idea I apply in my personal life and professional as a teacher and tutor, keeping in
mind emotion can make things seem much more out of control than they actually are.
Learning from Doing
Thus far in my life, I have found myself in diverse and unique situations. I have friends and
colleagues from all over the world and doing a huge number of various careers and living their
own lives. Diversity is something that I find beautiful. It is our differences that make life

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interesting and help bring new solutions to old questions. There have been many situations that
have been exposed to a more professional look in how different students can be, but also how
similar they can be as well. Despite our differences, people I know from across the world go
through similar struggles as I have gone through and what I have seen others go through as well.
We have doubts, we make mistakes, we question our surroundings and we try to find our future
selves while at the same time trying to succeed at what we are doing now.
This understanding is what ultimately helped me decide between a career in science or a
career in becoming a science educator. Through the classmates I helped going through college
and the students I help tutor at the learning center, I discovered that I am good at interacting with
people no matter how different they are from me. Even though we are different, we still have
enough similarities to build bridges of understanding. Taking the time to build these bridges and
gaining the experience to know how to do it effectively is something every educator should learn
how to do.
By doing this, I found students and friends thanking me, telling me they wished I was the
professor because everything made so much more sense when I explained it. The trick was I
wasnt explaining it that much differently than how the professor explained it. Since I took the
time to figure out what they knew before helping them, I knew where their weak points were in
their education and helped strengthen them first. By doing this, filling in holes and lapses in what
they were learning, the information made more sense and they began to build on those new
foundations to continue on succeeding.
I have found the biggest obstacle students can face in becoming successful is themselves. The
labels that have been placed on them or ones they place on themselves undermine growth and
change. The fear and apprehension of failure prevent them from trying or giving up before fruits

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of their labor manifest. Most students want to do well, they want to succeed and show they are
capable. It only takes someone with the faith and patience, such as an educator, to show them
how.
Some great examples of how this is true are seen in the kids I met while I volunteered at the
Buley Center. The Buley Center is a center for children, ages K 12, who qualify for certain
after school programs. It is located in an urban area of Muncie, IN and is the primary afterschool
center for students who attend nearby Muncie schools and live in the local neighborhood. The
center itself is staffed mainly by volunteers and funding is based upon the students who attend
and their performance in school. It is therefore very important to the center and the children who
attend that their time there is both entertaining and educational and helps improve or maintain
their performance level in school. If a student does not academically perform well in school or
shows to have behavioral issues, it is a possibility that the student may lose their spot in the
afterschool program. Each student is required to maintain a certain level of academic success
before being accepted to the Buley Center and to maintain or improve this level of success
during their time there.
For the most part, the students who attend the Buley Center are diverse and remind me a great
deal of the kids I went to school with. The demographic of the group who attended on the days I
was able to volunteer were predominately African American girls who were between the 4th and
6th grade in school. They reminded me a great deal of the students I went to school with, not for
their racial diversity, but because of their desire to learn but their hopelessness in navigating the
process.
As a tutor at the Ball State University Learning Center, I come across many students who are
academically capable, but struggle for various reasons that are not being addressed by their

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teacher. I saw this when I was doing my undergraduate, often re-explaining or re-teaching
material to friends and classmates during evening hours in the dorms when the teacher had failed
to convey the concepts in a way they were able to digest. In the Buley Center, I saw these same
things. Many of the young people who attended the center were extremely intelligent but lacked
certain background knowledge that would allow them to succeed. Some of them also had a lack
of self confidence in their ability to do the assignment correctly, making them afraid to fail and
avoid the situation entirely. They dealt with these challenges in a much different way than I have
handled them in the past.
When I have felt like I am missing background information, I often found a good resource
was to look at old assignments or ask the teacher for clarification. The students at the Buley
Center, however, seem to be withdrawn at the idea of admitting they do not know something,
even though they admit they need help. The students at the Buley Center are also seemed to be
extremely self-degrading. When I was in school, I often lacked confidence I was doing an
assignment correctly or completely. It was however engrained into my brain to turn anything I
was assigned in on time even if I wasnt confident I would receive a good grade for it. In my
school, being done on time was better than being done well. For the students at the Buley Center,
however, they are so discouraged at their performance in school that they will go through the
motions (or are forced to go through them) of doing their assignments but then they do not turn
them in when they are due, even though the assignment is done.
After talking with them, it became clear why. They said, in essence, that it is the fear of
receiving yet another failing grade, despite their efforts, that makes them unwilling to hand over
their work. This is a key problem that the Buley Center is designed to help solve. The center not
only provides a fun atmosphere for students to unwind and relax away from the school while also

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not at home, but it also gives them a chance to talk to someone outside of the school who can
help them with homework and give them a new perspective. By helping them complete their
homework and giving them confidence it is done correctly, the idea is they would become more
likely to turn it in. The hope is if they turn in more assignments and receive good grades for their
work, their attitude and self-image slowly improve with their overall grades, creating a repeating
cycle of improvement instead of continuing the downward spiral caused by failing grades and
worsening self-image.
This hypothesis, that helping them grow their self-confidence in their abilities will improve
their grades, has somewhat mixed results when put into practice. Some of the students have gone
through years and years of self-doubt and failing grades, so much so that the small amount of
time and encouragement they receive at the center is simply not enough. It is not to say these
children are lost, but it is to say that children who show early signs of struggling need to be
accepted into afterschool programs earlier to get them back on track before their academic selfimage is overwhelmingly damaged. As for the students I worked with at the center who have
struggled for years and continue to struggle more and more on a daily basis with their school
work and grades, the best I and others like me can do is continue to do our best to show them
they are capable and know more than they think.
It is our job, as educators, to make the material they could not understand during primary
instruction accessible during our secondary instruction. We must show the students different
avenues to work a problem, different perspectives to take of a situation and enabling students to
find their own methods to how they learn best. We all learn in way that is just as unique as we are
as individuals. Afterschool programs, like the Buley Center in Muncie, are exactly what children
need to succeed and should be encouraged for every student, even ones who do not seem to be

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struggling. The challenges we humans face can only be tackled as effectively as we can see
ourselves tackling them. We must believe, in our heart and mind, that we are capable and to do
our best, even if it is not an A+. The best is all anyone can expect from a student and their best
effort is precious. Their best effort is a triumph over the challenges they face in their daily lives
and should be treated with respect and encouragement. It is by pushing the boundaries of what
they can do today that we can help them think a little deeper and understand a little more
tomorrow.
It is this that makes me want to pursue teaching as a career. I see my students in my tutoring
sessions and the kids I met at the Buley Center blossom and grow under the right kind of light
and it all stems from my very simple belief that every students best is what the goal should be,
not some standardized goal a few can touch but the rest either surpass or never reach. What are
we really teaching students by having a goal someone else decides? That is a goal with little to
no considerations for individuality or the organic nature of life itself where nothing in a students
life is consistent or reliable and that their lives are not the same day repeated over and over, but
that time has moved on and so did the events of their personal and educational life.
Conclusions
My life has not been perfect, but who has had a perfect life? As the Doctor from the British
television show Doctor Who once said, The good things dont always soften the bad things, but
vice-versa, the bad things dont necessarily spoil the good things and make them unimportant.
In my life I have had both good and bad experiences, but all of these have come together to make
the person that I am. I love the diverse and amazing world I live in and the people who occupy it.
Sometimes those people shock me with their cruelty and selfishness, but I am equally amazed by
their generosity and selflessness.

Krista Fay Hook

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Due to of all of my experiences, I find myself thinking more deeply about ideas and beliefs. I
find myself not only accepting others for who they are and what they believe, but I revel in their
differences and want to learn more about them. As a teacher, I am in a position to role model
how children should behave as they encounter unfamiliar or incomprehensible situations. There
are some things some people will never understand or be able to accept as correct or right,
finding conflict in the actions of another because of their own belief system. However, no matter
how we believe, the freedoms we enjoy in America are for all, not for just one or two groups,
provided no one is hurting another. A classroom is a place to learn, to discover who we are and to
grow. We do these things by experiencing the unknown and walking away as a person who has
grown, hopefully with a deeper understanding. Depending on how a teacher guides the students
through these experiences, in a big way, effects how the students grow and how their lives allow
them to understand and view the world.
I am thankful every day for the large number of friends and colleagues that I have from
different nationalities, faiths, religions and creeds. They have enriched my life and the
knowledge and life lessons I have gained from them have made my life better. I hope to not only
bring these lessons and curiosity of others to my classroom, but also model this type of love of
people for my students. It is an instinct to be unsure of the unknown, but we can either teach to
be afraid of it or to be curious. I would much rather to live in a world full of curious people.