Honors Gateway Reflection

One of my identified strengths, love of learning, serves as the foundation for many of my life experiences that have had an impact on me or that I am proud to have completed. One of the experiences involved not only my love of learning, but also my leadership skills.

In high school, I was extremely involved in various leadership positions that involved planning dances to coordinating classes. However, one of these positions stands out to me especially strongly because of how it pushed me out of my comfort zone yet motivated me through my love of learning. This experience began with a moderator for our Senior year leadership team asking if anyone would be willing to help organize and execute a series of classes and activities with the fourth-grade students at our school. No one was too keen on participating and to be completely honest I wasn’t either. But it needed to be done so I volunteered along with a close friend of mine. This experience demanded that I not only dedicate time to spending entire class periods with younger students, but form lesson plans, organize groups of students to help me and my friend carry out activities, and communicate with various teachers and faculty members. I’ve never been the type of person that is great with kids as far as keeping them entertained goes so part of the research I did into lesson planning included researching how to effectively engage young audiences and reading about the attention span of current 8-10 year olds.

After researching with my friend various topics to teach to each of our fourth-grade classes, we came to the idea of a deep dive into recycling and wider implications of single use plastics on the environment as well as tangible ways for kids to be environmentally conscious without freaking them out with ideas like climate change or overwhelming them with information. I greatly enjoyed this process because it allowed me to learn more about the environment, recycling, and teaching. Knowing that I was hopefully getting kids excited about learning the same way I am excited about learning was so motivating and pushed me to work harder.

Although this experience may sound trivial to most people, to me, it was a whole new world opened before me. Like I said, I’ve never been particularly talented with kids, so it pulled me so incredibly far out of my comfort zone. As someone that would do anything to avoid working with kids to spending hours researching how to do my very best to have a lasting impact on a class of 10-year-olds was something I never expected for myself. Additionally, it allowed me to form close relationships with a variety of faculty members that I wouldn’t have gotten to know were it not for this experience. These new relationships made me realize that people are willing to trust me with important projects because they know I will perform at a high level. This exponentially increased my confidence in my leadership skills and motivated me to try even harder.

Moving forward, I find myself having greater confidence as a team member and a leader. I look forward to being able to participate as both roles on projects that open a new realm of learning and experience!