In seventh grade, I began helping in my church's children's ministry with children two and three years old and minimal expectations. What I gained was the discovery of my biggest passion. Working with children is my reason to get up in the morning, knowing that today I will be helping out in a first grade classroom or taking a shift in the daycare. I get to make a difference and be a part of their life. That means more to me than anything else I've ever experienced. I was always a dedicated - if not stubborn - child. Not only does that make me positive that I will be pursuing early childhood education despite the risk of lacking finances, a risk I am often reminded of, but it gives me a different perspective. In addition to playing with children, teaching them and keeping them safe, I try to teach them self-soothing techniques - ones that I wished I had known growing up. I think we often forget that children, despite their size and communication barrier, are people too. We treat them as lesser than. I try to make sure that when they are under my care, they are taken seriously as they deserve to be. This also includes respecting their inability to soothe themselves as a lack of knowledge, not a lack of trying. I respect them because I vividly remember being them: not understanding the point of busy work and being chastised for not being able to sit still. It wasn't a choice I could make, and I've found that it's often not a choice that they can make either. I plan on becoming a preschool teacher. The world needs more of those, I think. My preschool teacher was so important to my development, and even if I don't remember every detail of my time with her, I can see the effect she had on me even today and want to be that force in somebody's life. I have hope for my future, and hope for the future of education.

In seventh grade I began helping in my church's children's ministry with children two and three years old and minimal expectations. What I gained was the discovery of my biggest passion. Working with children is my reason to get up in the morning, knowing that today I will be helping out in a first grade classroom or taking a shift in the daycare. In a month I'll start teaching the kindergartners their choreography for the school play. I get to make a difference and be a part of their life. That means more to me than anything else I've ever experienced. I was always a dedicated - if not stubborn - child. Not only does that make me positive that I will be pursuing early childhood education despite the risk of lacking finances, a risk I am often reminded of, but it gives me a different perspective. In addition to playing with children, teaching them and keeping them safe, I try to teach them self-soothing techniques - ones that I wished I had known growing up. I think we often forget that children, despite their size and communication barrier, are people too. We treat them as lesser than. I try to make sure that when they are under my care, they are taken seriously as they deserve to be. This also includes respecting their inability to soothe themselves as a lack of knowledge, not a lack of trying. I respect them because I vividly remember being them: not understanding the point of busy work and being chastised for not being able to sit still. It wasn't a choice I could make, and I've found that it's often not a choice that they can make either. I am in the midst of my second year assistant teaching at my local elementary school. I am working with the same teacher as last year, and even though I am only two weeks in I am already reminded of how my time working directly with children in a classroom comprises the best experiences I've ever had. When my instructor had to take her son to the doctor when the majority of the students were out at recess and I was still inside helping a boy finish his math worksheet she told me that I was the first assistant teacher she had ever trusted to be alone in a room with one of her students to help him finish his work and keep him safe, and it is among the highest compliments I have ever received. Her students from last year see me in the hallways when I take this year's kids out to recess, and their faces light up. I might be having the worst day, and I can always trust that helping out with "hard math" - adding a one-digit number to a two-digit number - will make it better. I plan on becoming a preschool teacher. The world needs more of those, I think. My preschool teacher was so important to my development, and even if I don't remember every detail of my time with her, I can see the effect she had on me even today and want to be that force in somebody's life. I have hope for my future, and hope for the future of education.

In seventh grade I began helping in my church's children's ministry with children two and three years old and minimal expectations. What I gained was the discovery of my biggest passion. Working with children is my reason to get up in the morning, knowing that today I will be helping out in a first grade classroom or taking a shift in the daycare. In a month I'll start teaching the kindergartners their choreography for the school play. I get to make a difference and be a part of their life. That means more to me than anything else I've ever experienced. I was always a dedicated - if not stubborn - child. Not only does that make me positive that I will be pursuing early childhood education despite the risk of lacking finances, a risk I am often reminded of, but it gives me a different perspective. In addition to playing with children, teaching them and keeping them safe, I try to teach them self soothing techniques - ones that I had wished I had known growing up. I think we often forget that children, despite their size and communication barrier, are people too. We treat them as lesser than. I try to make sure that when they are under my care, they are taken seriously as they deserve to be. This also includes respecting their inability to soothe themselves as a lack of knowledge, not a lack of trying. I respect them because I vividly remember being them: not understanding the point of busywork and being chastised for not being able to sit still. It wasn't a choice I could make, and I've found that it's often not a choice that they can make either. I am in the midst of my second year assistant teaching at my local elementary school. I am working with the same teacher as last year, and even though I am only two weeks in I am already reminded of how my time working directly with children in a classroom comprises the best experiences I've ever had. When my instructor had to take her son to the doctor when the majority of the students were out at recess and I was still inside helping a boy finish his math worksheet she told me that I was the first assistant teacher she had ever trusted to be alone in a room with one of her students to help him finish his work and keep him safe, and it is among the highest compliments I have ever received. Her students from last year see me in the hallways when I take this year's kids out to recess, and their faces light up. I might be having the worst day, and I can always trust that helping out with "hard math" - adding a one-digit number to a two-digit number - will make it better. I plan on becoming a preschool teacher. The world needs more of those, I think. My preschool teacher was so important to my development, and even if I don't remember every detail of my time with her, I can see the affect she had on me even today and want to be that force in somebody's life.

My name is Alli Jo Brandon, and I am not a puzzle piece. My thought are not in a straight line, as they "should be". My thoughts are wind through a chime, a happy and disconnected sound. I am afraid of the dark, but not of the things in the dark. I met those things in the light and know them with great intimacy. I have been told that I am a passionate person, but I fear myself to be the opposite. There are too many words left to write and too many people I've not met. I grow flowers, because flowers are dreams.

My thoughts do not exist in a straight line. My thoughts are like wind through a chime, a disconnected sound that produces beautiful music. I have had a fascination with words since I was small - how they sound and feel on my lips, how they come together in color and light to create a picture. When I was in fourth grade, my class was assigned a two-month-long project that taught us descriptive writing. Mine had been about Golconda, Illinois - a town I had seen from the car window while my parents drove to work in the summertime. They were told I could paint a picture with my words, and that I should keep writing. So I did. In the next seven years, I was never without pen and paper. I wrote about flowers I've never met and people I've never grown, and about life and death and love as life and death and love became prevalent in my life. The Greeks recognized eight different kinds of love, and I think that all of them are beautiful in their own right. I write about the power of children, and all they do that is not seen. I am blessed that I possess enough words to try and capture these things. I have seen how a poem or story can change the world. This is what I aspire to. I used to color, as every child did. Some children grow to hone this skill. I did not. I cannot draw, paint, or color within the lines. But when I write I make paintings of my own. They live in every part of me: how I walk, how I speak, and what I dream of. I am blessed to be an artist in every sense of the word.

Once, when I was small, I was given a very important piece of life advice: "A cup of tea and a smile can solve any problem". It may have been an advertising ploy on the side of my mother's box of green tea, but it stuck with me. I was never much a tea drinker for most of my life, but I managed to find some substitutes. Among my friends and family, I have gained a certain reputation. If life is the "Most Likely To" section in a 2000s high school yearbook, I have been voted Most Likely To Surprise Someone With Fresh Brownies. When my friends see me, they completely expect me to greet them with a hug and a kiss on the forehead, regardless of height, gender, sexuality, or any other arbitrary social partition. The preschoolers I work with on Sundays enjoy crowding around me - and sometimes on top of me - for an unofficial story time during free play. And of course, everyone knows they can come over whenever they need anything at all, or even if all they need is a cup of tea and a smile.

All throughout my childhood, I was told stories. Fairy tales and adventure novels, yes, but also of my family. My bedtime stories were of my grandmothers, who worked in Russia to build houses for small communities and created beautiful art for her blank-canvas town. My examples were my mother, who to this day I have never seen turn down a request for help, and my father, who once made us late so he could help a perfect stranger dig their car out of a snowbank. Every Christmas, neighbors I hardly knew the names of would walk through the ice and wind to bring us a pie and expecting nothing in return. The world is full of such good and beautiful people that it continues to astound me. Service fills me with peace. Call it nature or nurture, I do not know and do not particularly care. In everything I do, I try the hardest I can to return the love I see given to me every day. Every winter for two years now, I run a service project. This year, I have been collecting non-perishables for local food banks. Last year, I held a clothing drive. I keep a spreadsheet of the people that agree to help, and every year it gets longer. More than that though, I have become known as the friend that remembers your birthday and stays up to make you brownies, and as the girl you don't know that smiles at you in the hallway every day, and as the unofficial counselor with an open ear. I hope that into my adulthood and career, I can continue to be worthy of these titles.

The world has come a long way from where it once was. It is slowly but surely becoming socially acceptable for people to love who they love, and to identify how they choose. It has brought me great joy to see the LGBTGI+ community work its way into mainstream culture. No matter where you go though, there seems to be the slowly shrinking- yet still very loud- minority of people that are of the unwavering opinion that you are born the gender you are and a man should only love a woman. More than that though, there are many people who are quietly opposed, or more often uncomfortable, with the LGBT community. I have found that homophobia of many degrees is often catalyzed by misinformation. My mother is of a generation that was taught not to acknowledge the queer community. She was raised on the principal, out of sight, out of mind. However, her life was not to be so simple; her father was gay, and came out in the late 1970s, when she was eleven. She walked through life after this with a respect for the LGBT community, but not as much acceptance as she would have liked. Mention of even positive news would often make her uncomfortable. One day, I was at a friend’s house when I overheard the conversation that my mother and her coworkers were having. They were quietly discussing what it meant to be asexual, the existence of non-binary individuals, and how someone could be genderfluid. It was then I realized that so often the reason for fear surrounding the LGBT+ community is because people simply don’t know what to think. They know what their parents taught them, which was rarely unbiased, what they see on the news, which has only recently become constructive, and can look back on their experiences with members of the community in a world where it has only recently become socially acceptable for them to exist in the public eye. These are the only examples for a generation with all of the potential for acceptance, but none of the means. That night when I got home, I took out cardstock and a handful of sharpies and began working on my family’s Guide To Pride: a chart with an extensive list of sexual and gender identities, their definitions, and their flag. She keeps the chart hanging in her room, and studies it. Since then, it has done a lot of good for our household. When I came out to her, she could look at the paper and know what I meant. When I overheard her talking to a friend, she was able to explain what non-binary pronouns are. She has made a conscious effort to open her mind, and it shows. She has even discovered that she identifies as omniromantic and demisexual. And the effects don’t extend only to her. A family friend of ours identifies as pansexual, and was terrified to come out to his homophobic mother. However, with what she learned from my mother and I and with help from her son, she underwent a very visible transition. He recently came out to her, and was accepted with open arms. As Bob Dylan famously said, “times, they are a-changin’”, and it is miraculous how a statement made so long ago can still be so applicable. The very ground is shifting beneath us, and though there will always be those that resist change, more and more individuals from all generations and backgrounds are learning and growing alongside each other. I am very glad to have helped contribute to that.