Learning

I am a learner at heart. As I have realized my passion for the world of education, and for the countless children education serves, I have also come to discover my deep love of learning. I do not consider myself one who loves learning for the sake of memorization, or to throw out names and titles in academic circles, but simply earning for the sake of learning. I love that there are classes I can take and immerse myself in new material. It is like entering a new world, and it truly excites me.

I credit a lot of this to my love of reading. I was asked yesterday in one of my education classes to share a fond memory of my childhood educational experience. As I ruminated and reminisced, the answer became clear: reading. Reading transported me to a whole new world as a kid, and I find that at the heart of it, I still love getting lost in a story. Sadly, in college, this often translates into movie-watching after my brain is a bit numb from all the intellectual reading. But at the heart of every (well, every WELL-made movie) is a story. A story from someone's perspective that helps you enter their world for a little bit. Stories can poke, provoke, incite to anger, move to tears, or help bring about realizations in your own life. This is exactly why I love watching (and afterwards discussing or debriefing) films.

I am a learner. And on these first few days of classes in a wintry, drizzly, gray northeastern Ohio morning, I am struck by the joy and privilege it is to dig through the trenches of the mind and of the world as a "full-time" learner. I want this semester, no matter what class I am in or whether it is my favorite material or not, to be filled with a labor of love and joy in the way I approach my learning.