MY STORY

          My journey from a little girl born in a low socioeconomic status family (and also of Vlach origin) to a teacher who has won numerous awards in the last few years was long and gruelling.

        There was giving up, swearing, stumbling, tilting at visible and invisible windmills, with so many ups and downs. What is it really about and how education eradicates poverty?

            That this thought really was true I realized when I made a parallel between what I had in my childhood and what I achieved thanks to my own efforts.

           I came to this world in a cold night of January 6, in 1974, exactly on the day when all Orthodox Christians finish preparations for the birth of Jesus Christ. At that time, my mom was only 16 years old and I weighed about 2 kg at birth. I had to start struggling for life immediately but without incubators and doctor’s help since I come from a rather poor and uneducated family. Later, my life was marked by growing up in a modest family in Sige, in a rural underdeveloped area under the auspices of Beljanica, with my father Siniša, mother Miroslava and younger brother Delimir.

My father was a miner, but he was also engaged in agriculture together with other family members. I spent childhood helping my parents to take care of the cattle, digging, gathering hay and other jobs suitable for children. As a child, I loved to play teachers. I also had my own diary whose columns I drew by myself, and I am fond of remembering the names of imaginary students whom I, as a teacher, graded so passionately. Hence so much love for the teaching profession. 




 Now I gladly share with my students these details from my life, as well as numerous other events from the elementary school, both from the very classes and student field trips, that was the only form of my travelling, and I use them as an example for developing positive personality traits. As an example of persistence and perseverance, I often state the situations in which my brother and I had to go to an isolated farm quite far from the village every day even in the snow and rain. It was probably then that a thought, that is my life motto today, began to stir in my mind: that education eradicates poverty! 

I also faced the struggle of learning in the Serbo-Croatian language (non-mother tongue to me) that was not easy to master in situations when everyone around you communicated in the Vlach language. This additionally empowered me; it was the wind in my sails to grapple with all the misfortunes and realize that life is a continuous struggle in which only the persistent and strong ones win. Of course, I had to gulp back a lot and walk through hardship, but I have always believed that education is the most powerful "thing" in the world that can change the lives of those who believe in it.

I wasn’t even aware back then of how many steps over thorns with a huge load on an inexperienced back it took to get to the position of an active actor on own stage. I finished school and returned to this underdeveloped area where there are more combined than one-grade classes, where students spend time helping the older ones with agricultural tasks and where most students, when starting school, do not read and bring scarce mathematical knowledge. I was assigned the role of a teacher in a combined class with four grades in an underdeveloped rural area where there was not even a decent road until a few months ago. It was a settlement of Izvarica, which counts only 320 adult inhabitants of the average age of about 47 years. To make the burden heavier, until two or three years ago in the village where I work there was also a problem of water supply that even affected students during their stay in the school. The school building is 83 years old and there have been no serious investments in its repair, at least since I started working here (in the past 13 years). For years I worked with very scarce teaching aids. I had at my disposal a limited-capacity computer that could barely be used to display the simplest presentations.

We also remember the days when we heated the water we used to wash hands in a pot on the classroom furnace before eating since in the cold days the toilet could not be used. Of course, everything depends on the perspective. I broke my teeth several times, I also struggled with stereotypes that nothing was done in small schools, so I rose again from ashes and said that this was a challenge I should accept and grasp with. Instead of a full classroom with at least five, six and possibly seven students I could "seriously" work with, I got only seven, eight little heads in all four grades to hone. In all of them, I saw real geniuses because otherwise I really would not have had anyone to work with. So with eight students, the number I usually have, I have won more rewards than those who work in one-grade classes, animated the local surrounding and showed the region how small, rural schools do have a "great soul". Through my blog, by examples of good practice and published works, I have shown my colleagues throughout Serbia how small schools of "illiterate" students can be converted into workshops in which each of the apprentices has their scissors and tailors its own way towards knowledge. Thus, in our small workshop, students make films, create handbooks, mind maps, posters, magazines and other teaching materials complemented each year by their younger friends. Realizing that I managed to do all this thanks to the achievements of my students, I have decided to share my life story, which, sad as it may sound, still seems victorious, with my students and base a new approach to learning on its foundations. I devised a whole range of activities aimed at highlighting the importance of education, as well as the autobiographical stories I use in different parts of classes with different goals. It is also worth mentioning that I have managed to transfer my love for teaching and teaching profession to my daughter, teacher Aleksandra Filipović, the best students in her generation and holder of numerous other recognitions.