Never stop learning because life never stops teaching
I am Bianca and I was born in 1992 in Bucharest, Romania. I was three years old when my parents decided to move to Canada. I grew up and went to school in Vancouver, and ever since I can remember, I have wanted to be a famous singer. The dream is still alive and even though I have taken many different paths along the way, singing is something that I am always working on. Here is my story, who knows maybe one day I will turn it into a song.
In 2004, my little brother was born and my parents decided to spend a whole year in Romania. We bought a little house in a small village on the outskirts of Bucharest. I was enrolled in the local school for grade 6. This was exactly how I would imagine living on the countryside would be. Life here was so different from the life that I had in Vancouver. The street that we lived on was not paved it was just a dirt road and in the fall when it would rain it would get all muddy, later on the mud would dry in crater like forms because of the cars that had passed through in the rain. Life there was adventurous, I would go to school in the morning and I would come back in the afternoon. I would meet up with the kids on my street and we would play hide and seek, play with toy cars, and run down the muddy road until the sun went down. School there was very different than school in Vancouver. The Romanian school curriculum was more complicated than the one in my elementary school in Vancouver. I was not used to having to do physics in grade 6 but this was normal in Romania. Physics and math were, and still are, my hardest classes. Geography was my favourite, and English class was the best, I was the most popular in English often helping my classmates with difficult questions. Overall, doing grade six in Romania was one of my favourite experiences and I think back to those times fondly.
A year passed quickly and next thing I knew we were back in Canada. Instead of going into grade 7, I skipped it and went directly into high school at King George Secondary. Being in high school was definitely different from grade 6 in Romania. Nobody took their toy cars outside or stayed out until 11 playing hide and seek, but I was back with my friends and glad that I would not have to worry about physics for a year or two.
My high school career went by smoothly. I was more of a sporty person rather than an academic one, many evenings were spent on the soccer pitch and many classes were skipped for more soccer. Being on the soccer team was one of the best things that ever happened to me I love the feeling of being part of something and knowing that as a team, we’re all working towards the same goal.
The summer after grade 11, my parents decided to give Romania another go. This time we lived in the city and I went to a high school that was super far from our home. I remember dreading waking up to take the metro and then a bus to get to school. Grade 12 in Romania was not like grade 6, all the kids were much older than I was, and I often found that I had nothing in common with them. Although I did not have to worry about physics, I now had grade 12 Latin on my plate, but with the help of my classmates, I survived Latin as well. This time around, I did not enjoy the experience as much and really wanted to get back to Vancouver and graduate with my actual friends. In February, my dream came true and we moved back to Canada. I was once again on my old stomping grounds and reunited with my friends.
Even though I did not enjoy it as much, I am thankful for the experience, I had in Romanian high school. It has given me a bigger view of the world we live in. It made me see and understand how cultures can differ from one another. The experience I gained by travelling and moving from one place to another, had a big influence on how I chose my career and over my formation as a professional sports coach and English educator. It has also inspired me to remember that are different modalities of learning and the fact that we are constantly learning all our lives.
I graduated high school in 2010 and I was accepted into Capilano University for human kinetics program. I still was not much of an academic person and suffered greatly with the workload of University. I successfully finished the program after three years and decided to go into liberal studies, which enabled me to approach a much broader field of interdisciplinary studies. I was still not quite sure what exactly I wanted to do once I was out of school and felt that liberal studies was the right way to go in order to test things out. I dabbled in many English courses, psychology courses, and language courses. I was obsessed with Spanish and anything to do with the Spanish culture. In 2015 I signed up for a program called CAPs which sent me to Barcelona to work as an English assistant, in a school and live with a Spanish family for nine months. I loved it, and after the program ended, I decided to remain there. I spent almost 3 years living in Barcelona working as a physical education and English teacher.
The experience of having to take care of myself on my own was eye opening. Until then I had never been apart from my parents and never had to worry about paying bills, cooking or doing laundry. In a sense, I finally grew up. Now I am back at Capilano and am currently working towards graduating from the liberal studies program. I am glad that my program it has allowed me to combine two of the subjects that I love the most, sports and languages, and to make me understand how they are connected. I am working on my graduate project, which I think is going to be quite special and unique, but of course on my down time I am going to continue working on becoming a popstar.