Hello everyone! For today’s Blogmas and Thursday Tales post I wanted to share my favorite classes over the years.

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I have and always will love school. I was always an excellent student and really enjoyed learning in a classroom setting. I know that it’s not for everyone but for me I loved it! Thus, I thought I should share some of my favorite classes by school levels!

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Thursday Tale #1: Grade School (K-4) – 3rd Grade

Starting with grade school, my favorite class was my 3rd grade class! Honestly, looking back it probably wasn’t the best class but I loved it at the time. Plus, I’d had low-key racist teachers in 1st and 2nd grade so I didn’t have too many great classes to pick from. In 3rd grade though, our teacher introduced us to the Harry Potter series! I was already an avid reader, so I’m sure I would have found the series eventually but my teacher would read us a chapter or two every so often (I don’t remember the timeline anymore) and I fell in love with it. I remember I made my mom buy me the first and second books from the book fair order form and I was so upset when the first book arrived after we’d finished reading the first aloud in class (I’d wanted to follow along with my own copy). Anyway, I remain a Harry Potter fan to this day (although I do admit there were some problematic things in the books at times).

I also remember we were introduced to Schoolhouse Rock in 3rd grade for our multiplication tables, which was a ton of fun! The entire grade was just a nice one I think, and it had lots of fun memories. It was also when I really started to understand that I had to take school seriously and really started to become a great student.

Thursday Tale # 2: Middle School (5-8) – 5th grade History

I greatly enjoyed my 5th grade History class for one vivid memory I have. After an exam on Native American history, which included a few extra credit points we could have gotten, I remember sitting at my desk waiting for my name to be called to get my exam. I hated waiting because my last name starts with “S” so I always had to wait forever! Then, when it was my turn my name was skipped! I was so confused!

Once we got to the end, the teacher revealed that I had the highest grade in the class! I think I had gotten a 100% already but with extra credit I got 104%! (I remember after I’d turned in the exam I was upset because I had remembered another answer that could have gotten me up to 105% in the extra credit). The extra credit had been to name as many ways that horses helped the Native American lifestyle that we’d studied.

The entire class was impressed and asked me how I’d gotten so much extra credit and gotten it all right. I remember being shocked that they hadn’t done as well because I remembered all the information from our Native American studies portion of our aforementioned 3rd grade class that most of us had been in (small town LOL). They were super confused when I “reminded” them and I was super confused why they didn’t remember as clearly as I did! We’d done a whole thing where we were given “Indian” names (so problematic now but in the 90’s it wasn’t haha) and then made vests out of paper bags that were supposed to look like we’d made leather vests and painted with symbols we were given (not sure what tribe they may have been from).

Anyway, I remain proud of that score to this day!

Thursday Tale #3: High School (9-12) – APUSH

My favorite class in high school was AP U.S. History. It was just a great course! The instructor was super passionate about the subject and clearly loved his job. There were two sessions of the course available and the other instructor also briefly took over ours when our instructor went on paternity leave. In order to prepare for the AP exam, we hustled to get through all the material, scrambling to take notes in class, review them daily, attend the prep sessions after school, catch up when we were out, and then handle the stress of the test. By the end of the year we had an amazing knowledge set of our country’s history and we were so proud of ourselves! I’m still proud although I was a bit upset I only got a 4.

Looking back, this class was a lot harder than most of my college classes. We were highly motivated to succeed due to our instructors but also I just really loved learning all that material. For the most part, I think a lot of it has stayed with me. Even if I can no longer tell you the exact dates of important events, I can speak to the significance of a lot of our historical events and I love that I have that knowledge.

Thursday Tale #4: Undergrad (BS) – International Marketing

This was a great class! My instructor as super knowledgable on the subject as he was pretty international himself. I remember he was from a Central American country and had worked in multiple countries in Europe before he taught us in the US. For one of our classes he had invited several high school students who were from Germany, who were visiting a local high school and our college. He asked them who the current US president was, which they answered correctly. Then he asked them the prior president, and went back 4-5 presidents, all of which they answered correctly. Then he asked us for Germany’s current president, and I was the only one to know for certain that Germany didn’t have a president but they did have a chancellor. No clue on the name though! It was a really eye-opening experience for me and I have tried to be more mindful of the global political scene since.

Our big project was creating a product for a certain country that we were randomly given, and creating a marketing plan for it! It was an incredible project. My group ended up getting assigned Russia, and we created a luxury gift box that one could pick up for a host/hostess gift. We worked so hard to make a model of it, design what it would look like, create the packaging and contents, build a website, film and edit our presentation, and write the paper. I ended up being the video editor, which gave me the skills I later used to edit my occasional YouTube videos for this blog. I also did a lot of the meshing of the paper together once we’d written our individual parts, editing the website and doing a lot of the copywriting for it too. It was an amazing project and I really enjoyed it. One of the really cool things after that too was when I met a Russian student studying in the US the following year and I casually mentioned our project to her. She immediately loved it and exclaimed “a Russian would absolutely buy that!” What a great compliment!

Thursday Tale #5: Grad School (MBA) – Leadership

By the time I was in grad school, one of my friends from undergrad was a year ahead of me in grad school and she highly recommended the leadership class to me. I had been so skeptical about it but took her advice anyway, even though it was a weekend class. I’m so glad I did! I loved the class! The instructor was very knowledgable and I found that I felt the class was one of the best I’d ever taken. I’d always been a natural leader, but this class really helped me focus on the kind of leader I wanted to be. I really resonated with the servant leadership and that entire concept of finding how to make your team succeed.

During class, we were split into teams and told we each represented a “department” of a company. Our task was to make something out of a given list of materials to transport an egg from the second floor to the ground floor without breaking. We were all sent to a separate room and told to get to work. As we planned, one gal in our group got to thinking and said “We’re all part of the same company, right? Why don’t we go see what everyone else is doing and make sure we’re all doing different techniques in hopes one will work and try to help each other.” We all loved the idea and immediately went to the other rooms. Some were way more open than others, one group even barred us from entering at all and insisted we could only talk outside with part of the group while the other member was inside guarding and hiding the project. But in no time at all, all the classroom doors were wide open and we were sharing materials, ideas, and helping each other. It was truly an impressive feat to get all these highly competitive MBA students to work together!

In the end, I don’t remember if anyone got their egg down safely or not but it ultimately didn’t matter. Our instructor revealed that the goal was to get us to work together, and we all felt we’d learned so much from that simple exercise.

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So those are some of my favorite classes from my many years of schooling! Share your favorite class below if you’d like!

Thanks for reading!

Pamela

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