

estrella publishing.
From Your Neighbors, For Your Neighbors

ESTRELLA PUBLISHING produces Arizona West Valley's premier and preferred
hyper-local community magazines. From Your Neighbors, For Your Neighbors.
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
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