As I think about the various themes that define my life as a student, there are three that stand out to me:
Pursuit of excellence: My mother, who was a teacher herself ingrained in me the desire to “do well in school”. Thanks in large part to her, I’ve been highly motivated as a student and have always striven for excellence. Throughout all of my education I strove to master the material presented and to get good grades. In that pursuit, I was taught to focus on the learning task first and to let the good grade be the consequence.
Learning as a rewarding and fun activity: Learning opened the doors to my imagination and gave me great satisfaction and joy. Hence, a central theme in my education was that it was almost without exception a positive experience.
A key motive for my pursuit of a learning degree is to learn how to make learning equally exciting and rewarding for my students. I hope to make the learning process as much fun for them as it is for me.
A key motive for my pursuit of a learning degree is to learn how to make learning equally exciting and rewarding for my students. I hope to make the learning process as much fun for them as it is for me.
School as an influence on my identity and personality: My school environments played an enormous role in the determination of my cultural and social identity and of some of my personality traits. For example, my schooling in Costa Rica (grade school) shaped me as a sociable and people-oriented person; I learned social skills in the Latin culture that are very much oriented to relationships and positive communication. My schooling in North America (high school and university) reinforced in me a different set of traits, including being task-oriented, being reserved, and observing more than talking. I learned to be more cautious in my interactions with others, in part because the (north) American youth culture into which I was thrust as a teenager was foreign to me.
