Well, March 5 and I’m finally putting up my first blog post. I don’t really know what to discuss so I guess for now I’ll just talk generally about Service Learning. Sometimes in class I feel like I have the boring topic to discuss because everyone went to beautiful places and all I did was go over the bridge to Holyoke. Then I remember how incredible that experience was and I wouldn’t trade it for anything. And it’s not like I wasn’t abroad I just wasn’t abroad last year. Instead a spent a month in high school living with a host family in Spain. Holyoke changed my life, as corny as that may seem to some. I always thought I wanted to be a teacher because that’s just what you do with a Spanish major but Holyoke totally changed my perceptions. I developed a connection with one student immediately who is very smart and driven. I continued to work with her this year as well and she enjoyed my company though she did not really need my help other than to check her work. This year as well as working with that student I also worked one on one with another student who needed extra help. We worked on homework and went to Outdoor Adventure club together, not only did we work in school stuff but she would ask me about college and if it’s fun and why I study Spanish. She would tell me about how it was going to be her baby brother’s first birthday soon and it was driving her crazy that he cried so much. She liked that I speak Spanish because I could explain the directions on her homework to her in an easier manner. Just going and talking to the different students made me realize that there are a thousand different things I could do with my life but the only one that would make me happy would be working with a program like connections in a community similar to Holyoke with a large Spanish speaking population. These students cannot speak Spanish during the day at school unless they are in their ELL classes and therefore if they have a question but cannot ask it in English they cannot ask the question. I believe that these students should know how to speak English but our system goes about it in the wrong way because we make it impossible to learn because we do not address the language policies as often as we should. Multicultural Education is a class about Affirming Diversity and acknowledging how students are different from each other because no two students are the same regardless of the color of their skin. I believe every person regardless of major should have to take a class like that because it opens your eyes to the fact that we live our lives based around an outdated, racist, sexist, and ableist system. I hope this wasn’t too much of a rant but I really wasn’t sure what to talk about.