Adult Learning

I always thought that when I was 24 I would be teaching a class of rowdy high school students how to write and English paper but instead I'm the one writing a paper and about myself nonetheless for my teacher. As you will read in this paper about me you will find out how I went from wanting to be a high school English teacher to becoming a preschool teacher, wife and mom. I will use some different developmental theories that we discussed in this class and a few from other sources to take an n depth look into the life experiences that helped to make me the person that I am today. Not only will you discover who I am and why I am but you will also find out who I want to be and how I plan to become that person.

I grew up in Santa Barbara, California. My parents were raised here and I went to the same schools as they went to and grew up in the exact same house that my mom and aunt and uncle did. So everyone in all of Santa Barbara knows someone in my family or myself. Anyways I am a middle child with a brother on either side of me. My brother Ned is five years older than me and he went to live with my grandparents when I was only seven, so I wasn't very close with him growing up. My brother David is only 22 months younger than me. We were very close growing up and went through a lot of crazy things together. I have some great memories of when we were smaller and I used to make him sit in my room in front of the chalkboard with my stuffed animals and learn his ABC's, his colors, his numbers and his shapes.

I grew up for the first nine years of my life with my step-dad around because my parents divorced when I was only a few months old. My mom has lupus so a lot of those years were very difficult because she would be in the hospital sometimes for months at a time. When she wasn't in the hospital she was trying to take us to do as many things as possible because she never knew how she would feel the next day. We had season passes to Magic Mountain and Disneyland and we went all the time. We also went up to northern California a lot to visit my grandparents. In the summer we would go to the lake there and go wakeboarding and boating and camp out for weeks at a time. It was so much fun. In the winter there we went to the ski resort and went wakeboarding all day and then came home for soup and hot chocolate. We would also go gold mining and rock hunting looking for gems. We also went on a lot of family vacations. We went to North Carolina to visit my grandpa. Florida to visit my uncle and Hawaii to explore for two weeks. So when life was good it was really good and when it was not so good it was pretty bad.

Then when I was nine my mom and step-dad divorced and my mom remarried and moved to Arizona. I stayed to live in Santa Barbara with my dad, not by my own will but by the will of the courts. After that my life was a crazy mess. I had an evil step-mother and two weird step-brothers and I was hating life. I was away from my brothers and my mom, the only people who really knew me. To help me through each day I immersed myself totally in my schoolwork. When I was done with that I would write short stories and read book after book after book. I loved all things that had to do with English class, reading, writing, poetry and more. I started tutoring other students and that's when I knew that I wanted to teach English. I was so good at it and even better at helping other people be good at it. At the end of junior high my mom moved back to Santa Barbara and I moved back in with her. That's when my life really changed. I started high school and I loved it, at first.

Freshman year was fun I had great teachers and great friends and interesting classes. Then sophomore year came and life totally changed. This is when, as Erikson would say "the central adolescent dilemma, identity versus role confusion" (cited in Boyd & Bee, 2006, p.27). In this theory Erikson believed that in order for someone to arrive at a mature identity they must find out who they want to be, what they want to do and their role in the world. This was most definitely happening to me. My mom had gotten divorced yet again and this time decided to date several different people. This took her away from home. I found myself paying the bills, grocery shopping and basically raising my younger brother. She left her checkbook for me to do it all like it was my responsibility now. She started to get sick again and couldn't work as much and wasn't making enough money to pay all the bills and buy food. That's when I started babysitting and cleaning houses for people so that I could make extra money for my brother and me to eat.

After a year of this I was getting tired of trying to do it all around the house and maintain a 4.0 GPA so I could get into a good school. I got a better paying job working for my uncle at the family boat