Honestly, something that I had not anticipated was learning so much about how powerful joy is. It really solidified when I became a teacher through Teach for America. My name is Paige Anderson and I'm a project coordinator for learning.com. I grew up in Wyoming's, star Valley, Wyoming. To be specific, there was one high school, there was one middle school, so everyone went to the same school. When we think about why did I do Teach for America, it's because of the teachers that I had. Um, my parents were both working full-time and traveling at least an hour. One way to get to work. I was really kind of raised inside of schools. My teachers made sure I ate, my teachers, made sure I had adequate clothes for the seasons. They made sure I felt supported. I was pretty involved in speech and debate in theater that consumed a lot of my life. I love making people laugh. So my whole kind of, of, my whole approach to undergrad was really to do theater, but it was always rooted in pol political messaging. So I, I ended up studying political science when I went to college and I realized that policy is a big deal and it's not accessible. So I graduated with a political science degree with the intention of going to law school, but I wanted to be somebody that made informed decisions based on my own life experience and that kind of really attracted me to Teach for America. Um, you get to be hands-on in a school environment that is not like your own. And I think that's powerful and I wanted to use that experience to shape policy. When I started teaching, the principal that I had, and I'm thankful for her, was very encouraging of us bringing our whole selves to the classroom. Obviously we have to be professional. We're teachers, we have to carry ourselves to a certain standard, a certain standard, but bring in your passions to the classroom and she would like check in on us to make sure we were doing that. So the school that I was working at was a very old building, very, very old public school. So imagine being a kindergartner and you're going to school for the first time and this is your environment, right? Like we were doing the best with what we could, trying to make it as welcoming as possible. What I did was I brought photography in and we painted the walls with our pictures, pictures of us learning pictures of us playing pictures of us making new friends, pictures of old friends, and the students started coming in excited. They went from being like incredibly timid. And this is not just like one student in particular. This is the whole, the whole group in kindergarten. They're very much learning how to be a human in an environment with other humans that are their same age. By putting pictures up on the door and on the walls of my students, honestly, experiencing joy. It helped them learn their names. It helped them learn how to write their names, how to write their friends' names. It helped them build community without me needing to do anything other than like print pictures, and that was incredibly powerful. Teach For America puts you in an area that is systemically underserved, intentionally under-resourced. That comes with challenges, period. One of the most powerful relationships that I got to build, obviously, was with my students, but what comes to mind is helping parents understand their rights and encouraging parents to advocate for their students. I really got to build strong relationships with parents who are now able to fully advocate for their student, so they go to the next grade. Now they can still advocate for them. That was, that was something that was something that was incredibly powerful about my experience. Teach For America not only gave me the opportunity to have that classroom experience that I'd never had before, but I met the like the best people of my life going through that program, old at my school site and also in the program. I did meet my partner through Teach for America and some of my best friends, but I would say it was also the hardest thing I've ever done in my life. If you are up for that challenge, I think you should do it. Absolutely.