It’s funny how the first interview I wanted to do for this month ended up being the last. I learned about world religions in my church class and the two that piqued my interest where Hinduism and Buddhism. When all of my ideas for this month started to swirl in my head, I knew that I wanted to interview one of these two religions. What ended up happening is that I couldn’t find anyone until this past week. That’s when I found a Buddhist from the Awakening Valley Sangha named John Judd and he helps to run the sangha in Provo, Utah. John has always lived in Utah. In fact,…
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I Talked with a Rabbi About Faith
I knew that one of the religions that I would be interviewing for the month would be Judaism. I have learned that it is an amazing religion and I wish that I could have spoken with my interviewee a lot more than I did. When I started asking people from that religion to interview with me, I got a varied amount of responses. Most people didn’t answer my calls or emails but one member told me that I should take a world religions class before asking her again. Finally, after a couple of days, a rabbi said that he would be happy to. Rabbi Samuel Spector has always been an…
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The Faith of a Jehovah’s Witness
After writing about faith from a Muslim perspective, I was thinking about other perspectives that other religions have too. I started searching for my next interview and somehow ended up searching for someone from the Jehovah’s Witnesses. Thankfully, after some failed attempts at interviews, I was introduced to Emily. Emily is a friend of my roommate who was so kind as to agree to do an interview with me. Because she is in Iowa, we set up a time to do an over-the-phone interview. When I first started talking to her, I could tell that she was passionate about what she believed in. She explained to me that Jehovah’s Witnesses…
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A Muslim’s Perspective on Faith
Usually what I do in my blog is I talk a bit about different topics that I find interesting that relate to people and in the third week I do an interview with another person about what they think about the topic. This month is different. Because it is my birthday month, I decided about six months ago that I wanted to chose a topic that I was really fascinated about and hopefully people would enjoy it as well. I then choose faith. But after I choose the topic of faith, my mind kept spinning on how I would write that month and what I could do to make it…
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How to Know When You Have True Learning
About a month ago, I was brainstorming with my dad about what I should write about during this month. One of the things that I thought would be interesting is knowing when you have truly learned. I thought this was interesting because before thinking about this, I would have told you that there wasn’t a limit to what you could learn. Learning seems to be everlasting. There is too much to one subject to just be learned. When researching the topic, I found that learning is ongoing but you can know when you have truly learned by teaching and by acting on your knowledge. Teaching has been something that I…
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Why We Need Teachers
I have always had a respect for teachers. They gain new students every year, go through the pain of trying to help them to learn, and yet they still call their students “their kids”. With all that I know of teachers, I really wanted to interview a teacher. As it so happens, my roommate, Julia, is a music education major. When I was thinking of who I would interview for the month, I asked her what she thought about education and when she answered, I knew that I had to ask her to be my interviewee. I first asked her why she chose to be a teacher. She said, “I…
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How to Create a Love of Learning
I hope that you have been enjoying this month’s topic about learning. I realize that I am not writing a long post today and that is probably because I have started writing my posts for July. I decided to do something that I have never done before for that month so this post will be shorter but I do have important information that I have compiled. I hope you enjoy. I have been in school for a long time. I have many ups, and many downs. Throughout that whole time, I have loved the idea of learning. I sometimes wonder if there are others who love learning as much as…
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What Makes a Good Teacher?
After going through almost 14 years of school, I would say that I have had my fair share of teachers. Some of which have been good while others haven’t been so good. With all of that experience I feel like I should have a good grip on what makes a good school experience, what sparks learning, and what makes a good teacher. I have had four good teachers out of all the teachers I had. One was my first grade teacher, my fourth grade teacher, my seventh and ninth grade English teacher, and my choir teacher. I don’t remember a whole lot about my first grade teacher. I do remember…
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The Power of Love
At this point in time, I have written this post about five times. At first, I wanted to write about focusing on the positive instead of the negative but then realized that not everyone can focus on the positive right away and it might be the wrong thing to say. Then I wanted to talk about enveloping those with depression with love but ended up writing about how lonely it feels to have depression. In the end, I realized that I want this post to radiate positivity and give hope to those who are either dealing with depression or those who are trying to help those with depression. In the…
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How Can We Help Others With Depression?
I asked my followers on Instagram what they would like to know about depression before I started my interview for the month and I received a response that really stood out to me- “How can someone without depression understand what it feels like?” Because I have been living with depression my whole life, it never occurred to me that other people didn’t know what it was like. I felt like it was the easiest concept in the world when it is probably the hardest. So, when I started my interview with Kerri. I kept in mind that I should ask her about what others could do to understand depression more…