I must acknowledge the depth at which my mom fostered my love for learning. She very much valued school, yet when I reflect on this, I feel as though she encouraged my curiosities outside of the classroom more than anything. She taught me that there was learning to be had all around me. She shared her passions with me, included me in life’s bigger choices and modelled the importance of play at any age. My mom raised me on her own. This taught me resilience and that women are powerful, in a society that doesn’t always corroborate that notion.School came naturally to me. As a result, four of my peers and I were asked to skip grade one. Our parents declined but settled on half days of grade two curriculum. Although I was young, this transition is vivid because I became visibly less gifted than these peers. In school and life, I began to feel a great deal of shame when things were difficult and often approached hurdles on my own, in hiding. Reflecting, I can see that this resulted in a very introspective, quietly insecure, and fiercely independent person who adored learning but resented binary systemsI grew up in a small social housing neighborhood, between suburbia and rurality. There were many school-aged children of various ethnicities. We attended school in a middle-class, mostly white neighborhood. I was in grade four when I actualized racial disparity and that I was a person of privilege. It clicked one day, why I had two sets of friends at school that should have been homogenous. This awareness sharpened over the years, but equity takes more than awareness. I have not been the perfect ally, but this actualization at a young age expanded a practice of compassion and reflection.
Please click through the following pages to interact with my timeline of educational influences.
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