I have spent today scanning through my notes from recent classes looking for inspiration for this blog post. Recent discussions have been surrounding the preparation for our upcoming paper, formulas for success, and the structure of the poetry we have recently read. I found that none of these topics inspired an insightful blog post, so I began thinking of how these topics related to my other classes. Again, I drew a blank. Until I reviewed the page in my notes about lenses; I needed to look at these topics through a different academic lens.

Suddenly, all of the topics I had been looking at in my books related perfectly to all of my other classes, and much of my previous education also. I read a line in my notes about the second poem we looked at being a “process poem”. Process. The word suddenly stuck out to me as I shifted to a more general lens, not in the context of poetry, but considering the education system as a whole. My entire educational career has been a process. Each year preparing me for the next. I grew up with a mother as a teacher, constantly preparing me for my first days of school at the young age of 3. There they taught me everything I would need to know for when I began full-day classes in grade one. This continued until grade 5-7, when we learned cursive (which they assured us we would need to know because “everything in high school would need to be written in cursive”— yet I never used it once). My entire grade eight year, my teacher constantly made reference to how he was preparing us for high school: “I am being hard on you because this is how your high school teachers will be”, “This will be vital when you start high school”, “Remember this, you will absolutely need this knowledge for high school.”. I remember my friends and I questioning why they spent so much time preparing us for the next stage of life rather than enjoying this one. The great thing was that we weren’t in high school yet, yet the amount they talked about it made my fears of the next stage worse than it would ever be.

Grades 9-12 they were always telling us, everything you learn in this building is to prepare you for your post-secondary education. Again arose an obsession with the future. MLA and APA were a major focus, making it seem impossible to get a bibliography or work cited page completely perfect. Although, the things my grade 8 teacher had so courteously warned us about did not seem to be relevant. Cursive was a joke as everything we did was on computers.

Now here we all are, in University. The time we have been preparing for since we began grade school. I thought this was the end of the long process, but I have recently discovered it is just the beginning. All of this information we have been given must be put to use in deciding what we will study to practice for the rest of our lives. The process of acquiring prerequisites to get into our desired schools was completed, but the process of picking a major, minor, and a career path has just begun. It will never end, but it will always develop.

I was once told that most of the jobs my classmates and I would work in the future have not yet been created. The companies and products we will devote our lives to are not yet in action. This thought changes the lens with which I look at this “process” of education. It is not a destination, there is no end. It is an evolution of self and global development. After arriving at this thought, I shifted my lens to consider what this meant for us as global citizens. The entire process of my education has shaped me into a functional member of society. I have been taught ethics, responsibility, and essentially how to merge with the current state of society. As I talk to employers and employees in the field I plan to one day work in, I have learned that my education will never stop. As science and medicine develop, so will my line of work. There will be more we can do for patients so each year we will be required to attend courses to update our knowledge. Although education will not stop, a new process will begin, to act as a global citizen and use our education as an opportunity to give back to society.

I realize this is a big jump from what was in my notes. Although, I would like to note what I learned as I planned and wrote this blog post. When beginning to write my paper, I struggled with lenses. I failed to see the importance it had and the impact it could have on my paper. Thinking with a “lens” allowed me to see something in my notes that wasn’t there. It inspired thought and creativity. My rough notes for my essay were lacking in many departments. My lens was weak and I had a hard time understanding what my essay needed. Writing this post assisted with my understanding of the value of the lens in my essay. It completely changes the context and direction which I can take my topic, which are essentially endless when I consider the various lenses which I have access to. All in all, lenses are much more valuable than I originally thought.

Alana Redka