​ESTRELLA PUBLISHING produces Arizona West Valley's premier and preferred

hyper-local community magazines.  From Your Neighbors, For Your Neighbors. 

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Up The Hill magazine (Estrella & CantaMia),  Viva magazine (PebbleCreek), The Hamlet magazine (Palm Valley), The Park magazine (Litchfield Park), Main Street magazine (Verrado & Victory), Mountain View magazine (Vistancia, Trilogy & Blackstone),  The Front Porch magazine (Marley Park), and White Tanks View magazine (Surprise Farms, Sierra Montana, Waddell Hacienda, and Sterling Grove)

From Me To You

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Back to School! Those three words struck terror in my heart as a child, new people, new schedules, new places, new opportunities to embarrass myself with the amount of things I didn’t know. Would my new back-to-school outfits be cool or not? Would I get the teacher everyone loved, or be stuck with the ones everyone dreaded? The list was endless.

 

As a parent I felt slightly differently about back to school time. Entertaining 4 small people of varying ages for several months in the blistering heat of summer vacation went rapidly from an adventure full of opportunities to becoming a burden of keeping them busy and trying to stop the endless bickering. I must say that despite my resolutions at the beginning or each summer I did use television and later the internet in heavy doses - always in a educational way, of course ;)

 

Now I am getting a degree and back-to-school applies to me. It is very different approaching education as an adult who has chosen to reapply myself to academia. I am soon to begin my second year as a Mature Student and this time I have a confidence in my abilities as well as an interest in what I will be learning. Finding notebooks and pens is fun when I am doing it for myself. Ordering text books and choosing my subjects holds an appeal that I don’t remember from my youth. I studied Shakespeare in high school and we all dreaded it. The groans as we tried to understand the language would reverberate around the classroom. Now I see Twelth Night on the curriculum and I am excited for the challenge. Perhaps that has something to do with my ability to get help via the internet now but either way it is going to be interesting.

 

Having a full year under my belt I have the confidence that I can do this, and I realized that I enjoy learning. Interacting with others taking the same path and making new friends is all part of this journey and I am looking forward to going back to school!

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Catherine Uretsky

Editor in Chief, Estrella Publishing