Irene Kagoya – Leadership and Ethics Instructor
It has now been a month since I started delivering the Leadership and Ethics course at Akilah. The students at Akilah are a special lot; they have been open and really showed the urge to learn with utmost honesty. For the past month we have been trying to discover who we are. There are a number of topics that we undertook in class, but one amazing one that left each of them excited was our unit on Myers Briggs Personality types. Many students later told me that they felt that by understanding their own personality type, they really began to understand themselves.
Another class that touched everyone including myself was a class on confidence building. Each student developed a brochure about herself, and then distributed it to her classmates. Her classmates wrote positive comments about her in her brochure. The students were so thrilled to learn what their colleagues thought of them and were in high spirits that day. One student during Kanatapi described her brochure as a mirror of herself. I could not hold back the pride of being a teacher that day – it was shining through.
Each day at Akilah has been inspiring. I walk out of the classroom knowing that our students are true leaders of not only tomorrow but today. I have no doubt!