Hello there! My name is Aileen Marrero, and I’d like to welcome you to my blog. I’m a poet and a reader at heart, with a B.A. in English from Clemson University; and a writer and a thinker, currently getting an M.F.A. in Writing from Savannah College of Art and Design. While writing and reading has always been my passion, I’ve grown to see that education is also a big passion of mine. Although I’ve always sort of fought the notion that I’d never be an educator, I do have this intense yearning to better our education system.
You see, my mom has always told me that I would eventually grow up to be an educator, and I honestly just don’t want to admit that she could be right. She told me my freshman year of college that I was supposed to be an English major even though I had entered into Psychology, and I fought that until halfway into my sophomore year when I realized Psychology really wasn’t meant for me and then changed my major to English. Now, she’s telling me it’s in my DNA to become an educator, but I’m still fighting it (sometimes I’m not entirely sure why though, however it could have something to do with the stubbornness I got from my mother).
Even though that’s so, I do know that I want to impact the way we look at education today in some manner, which is why I started Apples to Oranges. It gives me a way to talk about the issues in education I care most about, and how transformative education is the future of education for our children, without having to become a teacher or principal or politician.
Coming from a background of educators in my family I have always been passionate about education, especially after growing up in a broken system. It is my personal goal to create a change within our education system so that kids across the nation will know what it means to truly learn and have fun while doing it. Education isn’t about students memorizing facts for standardized tests or schools meeting difficult standards in order to not be shut down. Education is about learning and teaching to instill a passion for education in our children. The more we begin thinking about how to overcome these obstacles, the more we will see that by banding together we can truly create a better education system for our children and our educators alike.
Apples to Oranges 