Welcome!

         My name is Noorulain Syed. Welcome to my Education Portfolio. I am an Elemetary School teacher, I have recently graduated from Concordia University in St. Paul, Minnesota.   

          I was born in Sahiwal, a growing city in south eastern Punjab, a province of Pakistan. When I was in pre-school, my father was posted to Middle East. We ended up living three years in the Sultanate of Oman and five years in Yemen. When I graduated from 4th Grade, my parents moved back to Pakistan and we settled down in Karachi, the largest city of Pakistan. I was 17 years old and in 11th 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 employment 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. For almost six years I have been working with a broad range of students, in different educational settings, from kindergarten to junior high. These students were from very diverse backgrounds. During these years I have realized that one of the reasons for kids having trouble, in later school years, is that the basic conceptual problems they had in their elementary years were never explained properly. Instead, they were dragged to the next grade. Thus students enter secondary school and then high school with limited, vague, or no understanding of those basic concepts or principles. 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 upon which they can construct the monuments of their future success.