Hello! My name is Noorulain Syed. Welcome to my Education Portfolio. I am a senior at Concordia University in St. Paul, Minnesota.  I am majoring in Elementary Education from Pre-K to Grade 6.

          I was born in Sahiwal, a growing city in south eastern province of Punjab, Pakistan. When I was in pre-school, my father was posted to Middle East. We ended up living three years in Sultunate of Oman and five years in Yemen. When I graduated from 4^th Grade, my parents moved back to Pakistan and we settled down in Karachi, the New York of Pakistan. I was 17 years old and in 11^th grade when my parents decided to move to United States of America. We came to Chicago, lived there for a year, then we moved to Tampa, Florida, and it wasn’t till last year that my father changed his company and I ended up moving with him to Minneapolis.

            I started as a Biology/Microbiology major but my exceptional love and involvement with children made me realize that the road I was headed to wasn’t leading me to my ultimate destination.  After some discussion with my parents and my work supervisor, I decided to change my major to Elementary Education. I have been working with a broad range of students from Kindergarten to junior high from very diverse backgrounds in different educational setting for almost six years now. During these years I have realized that one of the reasons kids having trouble in later school years is that the basic conceptual problems they had in their elementary  years were never explained, instead they were dragged to the next grade on the perception that those problems are not to be addressed in that specific grade but grade prior to.  Due to this misconception students would enter secondary school and then high school with limited, vague or no understanding of those basic concepts. New and advanced information just adds to the misery which eventually results in students failing or dropping out of school.  My goal is to set a strong foundation in the elementary school years that they can use to construct the monuments of their success.