Creative Nonfiction Exercise: Tell a story about an event that taught a life lesson or
revealed a personality to you.
When I first started going to college at Kutztown
University, I initially entered as a Special Education major. For much of my life my family and I
lived three houses down from a family that had twins; one of them with
autism. I baby sat once a week for
them, and found that I was truly interested in working with autistic children. Not only did I continue to babysit Cole
and Logan, but I began to volunteer at a day care that had some mentally
challenged children as well. The
first semester of Special Education was great. I loved my classes, met some really cool people, and for the
most part had great Professors. Life
wasn’t spectacular, but I loved what I was learning about.
My
Introduction to Special Education class taught me a lot. It was interesting to me because I had
a chance to learn about all the different kinds of mental retardation, and
other diseases as well. One day
for a presentation, one of my classmates brought in her 16 year old autistic
brother. She showed us how every
night before he goes to bed he still lines his bedroom wall with stuffed
animals and continues to do other things that he has his whole life. For some reason the entire time I went
to school for Special Education, it never hit me that Logan will be like this
his whole life. It doesn’t matter
how much I work with him. He might
improve, but he will always have autism.
I began to realize after the presentation that I would most likely not
be happy in the field of Special Education over an extended amount of
time. It might be interesting to
learn about autism and other mental handicaps, but to work in the field for the
rest of my life would eventually become exhausting. Convinced I did not want to turn something I enjoyed into a
chore, I changed my major.
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