Celina woman globe trots with scholarship's help

CELINA - Kailee Ross is back home in Celina after spending a year teaching in Greece but will soon set off for another adventure - furthering her education in Scotland.

Ross, the daughter of Jim and Teri Ross, snagged a prestigious Rotary International Global Scholarship that will allow her to study at the University of Dundee in Scotland. This comes on the heels of an English teaching assistantship through the Fulbright U.S. Student Program, which led Ross to teach English to grades 1-6 in a private school in Chalandri, a suburb of Athens, Greece.

"I'm excited because I think the Rotary Foundation is the exact kind of organization I want to be involved with for the rest of my life," she said, pointing to the organization's commitment to humanitarian causes. "I'm an educator. I value my community. I value giving back, and I value international understanding."

Ross, 23, graduated from Celina High School in 2014 and in 2018 from Ball State University, where she earned degrees in elementary education and teaching English as a new language.

"I was searching for ways to fund higher education internationally because that's very important to me, especially with being a teacher that's most likely going to be working with international students some day," Ross said of the Rotary scholarship. "I wanted to be able to become a very globally minded teacher, understand what's going on in the world and how education was being executed across the world."

Fanning the flames of a burning desire to learn and teach, Ross will depart on Aug. 15 to pursue a professional graduate diploma in education, with a focus on primary education. In the United Kingdom, students wanting to teach earn a PDGE after obtaining a bachelor's degree, Ross noted.

"It's kind of like a stepping stone to a master's (degree)," Ross explained. "I really wanted to receive international education because all the schools in the world do things differently, and I think to be able to go through an international teacher preparatory program is an outstanding opportunity."

She chose the University of Dundee because it's a smaller school with a great PDGE program, she said.

"So I'm learning how to be a teacher in Scotland, and while I'm not planning on being a teacher in Scotland, being a teacher is being a teacher, and you're going to learn something from every program," Ross said.

Studying in Scotland will also afford her a chance to trace her roots.

"It's going to be a whole new cultural experience," she said. "I never really thought I would have the opportunity to be able to explore part of my heritage, but being there I think I'm going to become a lot more interested in it."

Turns out one of the Scottish Rotarians with whom she's been in contact has the surname Ross.

"His last name is Ross, and he's from the same area of Scotland that my ancestors were from," she said. "Who knows, maybe I'm kind of distantly related to him?"

She also said she's looking forward to observing family unit dynamics in Scotland.

"They seem like a very welcoming group of people, and they're very excited to have a Rotarian scholar there with them in their club," she said. "So I'm looking forward to getting to know their families and how they live their lives there."

Ross said she plans to dive headfirst into the Scottish experience without any preconceived notions or expectations, a mindset that she said served her well and allowed her to grow even more during her sabbatical in Greece.

"I wasn't comparing it to this experience that I thought I was going to have," she said of Greece. "So I'm not stressing out about it. I'm just going in and what happens, happens."

Another reason Ross set her sights on Dundee was its Rotary Club's mission of "think globally, start locally," a mantra that matches her outlook on life. She said she'll work with the club's youth development program that encourages boys and girls to get involved with their community.

Reflecting on her time in Greece, Ross said its people were proud of their community. She too is thankful for the community where she grew up.

"Especially my generation, we're losing the pride that we once had in where we came from," she said. "There's nothing wrong with wanting to go and live in other places - I want that. But I also think you need to remember where you're from and living abroad had done that for me."

Greece proved to be a trial by fire because Ross didn't know a lick of Greek before arriving. She took Greece classes twice a week but mostly absorbed the language by listening intently to conversations.

"I learned more in 11 months there than I did in three years of formal language class," she said. "When you're thrown into an environment where you're almost forced to speak and learn the language, it's sink or swim - and I swam."

It certainly wasn't the textbook way that emphasizes mastery of grammar and syntax.

"When I was speaking with my friends in Greek I was not using perfect grammar and it didn't matter because the purpose of language is to communicate, and that's what we were doing," she said.

Ross applied a similar approach to teaching English in Greece.

"I chose Greece because they don't speak English as their first language and I would have the chance to work in an elementary school," she said. "I want to work with those types of students when I come back to the U.S., and I wanted to really immerse myself and almost kind of put myself in their shoes."

The program was fully immersive, meaning the students weren't allowed to speak a word of Greek.

"Because when the students have that crutch to rely on, they're going to go back to their mother tongue," she pointed out.

Ross engaged in interactive learning with the children.

"We were dancing around and singing songs and drawing pictures. It looked like a wild zoo in there," she said. "It reminds you that everyone can and should learn in that way because it sticks."

Asked about her future, Ross said she wants to come back to the United States to teach. She's excited at the idea of having her own classroom, adding that her mother was a teacher in Celina for 35 years.