Where did my Minnesotan accent go?

Photo By: Steven Vance

I will be the first to admit that I did not grow up in a school that had a low budget. My large, Minnesotan town produced class sizes of over 900 and my high school consistently ranked in the top ten high school football programs in the country. We traveled to St. Louis, MO every year as a 300 person marching band and now that I have graduated, every student and faculty member has a MacBook Air to use during the duration of the school year.

But when I moved to Chicago, I experienced something completely different. I traveled to a local soup kitchen once a week to help serve the homeless, helped younger students learn to read music, and even went to tutor kids at a local Chicago Public Schools Location.

Talk about culture shock.

It was something that I have never experienced in my entire life. Yes, I had traveled to different cities with different circumstances, but it was an unknown concept to me that students didn’t even have access to a printer.

Chicago Public Schools is an entirely different system than Eden Prairie Schools. Chicago Public Schools currently has over 650 schools, 22,000 teachers and 400,000 students. Eden Prairie has eight schools, maybe a few hundred teachers, and high school graduating classes are a little bit bigger than 800.

I grew up going to football games and hanging out at Dairy Queen and Mall of America. After school I would sit in my basement playing Xbox with my two brothers and practiced my violin lesson. I’ve never truly realized I hadn’t had to deal with any of life’s problems until I experienced them in Chicago.

My first time truly investigating Chicago Public Schools was this semester for Mosaic Magazine. Reading through interviews with teachers who have had to deal with multiple budget cuts made me feel extremely privileged to go to school at a place like Loyola. I’ve never experienced an environment where you feel completely safe, but as soon as you travel to where some of the students are from, you realize how much different it is.

There is a part of me that thinks I will continue to go on living every day how I did in Minnesota. But there’s a large part of me that now knows what is outside the Loyola campus and is excited to help change that. It may sound completely corny, but I’m excited to see what I can do to change their lives. It can be something as simple as me spending an hour or two of time once a month could make someone experience high school like how I experienced high school. Living carefree and participating in activities across the board, then going on to an incredible future and a class that teaches them how different the world outside of their own boundaries is and how they can change it too.