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Personal Essay : Personal Values

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American singer and songwriter, Andy Biersack, once phrased in an interview, “Always be yourself and rebel against what people tell you should be and be whatever you want to”. This quote resonates with me, as it seems to sum up my attitude in life. All my decisions are based on what I, alone, cogitate and feel about the situation. Truly I will be me no matter what. While, I was unusually independent as a baby, I didn’t always have this attitude. Indeed I owe Elsie Gray for planting the seed of self reliance in me. Elsie Gray was a para-educator at my elementary school. Never called Mrs.Gray, Elsie was known around school as the most fractious person on staff. The students dreaded having her in a class, flinched when she called someone out, and groaned if she was filling in for a bus driver. When watching a class in the computer lab for a teacher, she told students to twiddle their thumbs if they finished. She’d holler at kids to sit down on the bus if one kid wasn’t seated as the bus started. In hindsight, I notice she was a straightforward woman who took nothing from nobody but as a kid, I was alike the other students and perceived Elsie as Cruella De Vil, ready to sew misbehaving students into coats.
Southeast Elementary, my elementary school, was a one building K-12 school in the middle of nowhere and about twenty minutes away from the border of Nebraska. Tiny towns and tiny farm and ranch families who owned large amounts of land speckled the landscape. For this

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