-: I just love students.
I love working with at-risk kids.
I was at-risk kid myself also.
I loved trying to help students
that aren't too excited about education.
I love helping them to understand the importance
and also them find their niche of like what is it
you wanna do, why is it important, here's why it's important
because I myself was a student struggle.
I wasn't the best student.
People know of my history at the U of M
but due to some of my academic counselors here,
I was able to, they were able to open my eyes
and help me to understand the importance and help me
to find out some of my interests,
which happen to be education ironically.
And so that's what I just love,
love helping students figure it out.
I'm just trying to be the buffer
between the student and the teacher.
Like I said before, lot of times the teacher,
I admire them.
They're dealing with 30 different students,
30 different personalities, 30 different backgrounds,
and also trying to teach them, manage their behavior,
manage the classroom.
It's extremely taxing job and so when I'm able
to get the student one-on-one, I'm able to kinda help
the student understand the teacher's perspective
but also the teacher
to understand the student's perspective.
And at times, it can become a power struggle
in particular with the students
who just want things done their way
and they think they know exactly how it should be done.
And just kind of being a buffer between the two
and helping the teacher understand,
hey, these are some things as well that they're working on
so if we can kinda give them a little bit of grace
moving forward and work with them
while they're in this difficult time in their life
that not everybody knows about, I think it'd be great.
And so just kind of doing that day in, day out
can be exhausting because you getting pulled from both sides
but ultimately you wanna support.
Your staff support the teachers because they, like I said,
have a daunting task of teaching 30 different kids
and then trying to manage all their personalities.
So it's extremely tough.
That's why I admire them so much.