Ingrid Illustrated

A pivotal moment in my education was when I first joined Girl Scouts. I still remember the very first day in kindergarten with all new shining faces, games, and snacks. It was so simple back then, but it has developed into so much more. When you think of education, you think of STEM, but Girl Scouts has taught me so much that I couldn’t possibly learn in a classroom. I have learned much more about myself and the growing world around me. I now know that I learn best with hands-on experiences, which are presented in many opportunities through Girl Scouts.  For example, in kindergarten and first grade, I learned to help people, and to give to those with less than me at such a young age. I volunteered many hours at senior homes, food banks, animal shelters, and more. In second and third grade, I learned to expand my interests and try new things which led me to dance, a hobby I am now extremely passionate about and dedicated to. In fourth and fifth grade, I devoted lots of my time going...

In the beginning of the semester, writing was like a chore for me. The thought of writing a 250 word blog post every week made me want to put it off until the last possible minute. And my blog posts in the beginning definitely reflected this mindset. You can tell entries like my very first blog, “Does Money Equal Happiness?”, are rushed and surface-level. The one-giant-paragraph format made the writing hard to follow, the sentence structure didn’t make sense, and you could easily tell I was just writing to fill up the 250 word requirement. I asked a lot of questions in my writing which could stylistically be good, but I didn’t execute it too well then. Another thing I notice about those beginning pieces is that I wrote about things I didn’t really care about. Money is not a topic I am very interested in or passionate about.  In the middle of the semester, I was finding myself as a writer. I played around with different styles, which can be seen through my blog posts again, and also...

We should decolonize the literary canon to include a variety of points of view, so we can become more informed about the real, diverse world today. The literary canon is seen as some of the most important and influential pieces of literature ever written. Almost all of these books are written by white men, and many feature only important white, male characters. The few that do include women or people of color characterize them as less than men. Many of these texts are flat out racist, and people of color cannot relate to them. Many of us live in our own “bubbles”, oblivious to the horrors of the outside world. Decolonizing the literary canon will expand our points of view and pop those “bubbles”, exposing us to the important issues of the world. Also, as a female person of color, me, and many others do not feel represented by these books praised by so many. The fact that we can’t relate to any of these books or the characters in them, makes them boring and hard to read.    Acc...