Third-grade learning support teacher Rebecca Meredith shares her story of growing up in a small town in Michigan, in the United States, knowing that she wanted to become a learning support teacher. What she didn’t know, early on, was that international teaching and living abroad would be her calling. Right now, she’s loving it, and her exciting life is something she can’t imagine living any differently.
What follows is Rebecca’s story, in her own words:
Growing up, I didn’t know what living internationally would be like. I’m from a very, very small town in Michigan in the States and so I had never seen anybody living abroad or knew that this was a thing. So growing up I thought I would just become a teacher and live in Michigan my whole life, and then once I was exposed to it in university, I was like, ‘Oh my god this world is incredible, look at all the places I get to go to, look at all the people I could meet, look at all the cultures I could experience.’ And so once I learned about this, this is exactly what I wanted to do with my life. But growing up, no, [my life is] very different than what I anticipated it to be.
When I was in elementary school, I had seven kids in my class. That’s it. Seven. Very, very, very small class. That was the entire grade. I went to a very small private school, and then when I went to high-school I went to a public school and I graduated with 35 kids.
Even when I went to university, my roommate, my freshman year, went to a school and her graduating class was 600 and I remember being like ‘600 kids!? Thats crazy! How did you know all of them?’ and she was like, ‘I didn’t know all of them’. I was like, ‘That’s wild!’ I knew everybody, and their mom and dad, and their grandparents!
I feel like I’m living a life that I wanted to live. I made this manifestation list before I moved here, like what I want my life to look like wherever I moved next, and I feel like I am living all of the things that I wanted on this manifestation list. So I think my dream is just to continue on this path of doing things that bring me happiness or joy with people that find joy as well.
I love everything about my life, I love the people, I love where I live, I love technology – how I can easily talk to people all over the world… Yeah, I love my life.