In high school, I had 17 Dean’s detentions my freshman year alone. I had to have my father bring me back to school on Monday mornings for my daylong in-school suspensions. Next day though, if someone said "Hey, Sheryl, lets go to the Cubs game, or out for breakfast, or whatever," I was out that field house door as fast as my feet would carry me. I just could not find value in school. Doesn’t mean I wasn’t taking the time to educate myself. I read like a mad lady and explored ideas and avenues that interested me. Actually, those in-school suspensions, sitting in one study hall after another, with a book of my own choosing was more palatable than being in classes that bored me no end.
When high school ended, I chose not to extend the torture. I opted to work instead. I spent that first year working in Lutheran General Hospital's x-ray billing department while visiting my friends at various schools in Illinois. To my surprise, work soon became an even bigger dead end than school; so, reluctantly, I started at Oakton Community College. I think it was the first year it opened (had to be 1971), and I raised my grade point average so that I could transfer to a four-year school. I transferred to Western Illinois University as I thought it was easier than Northern, not as far as Southern, and I had many friends there; academics never really entered the picture. Since I only had one distant uncle in my family who had graduated from college, I did not have the support or guidance that would have been helpful to me at that time. I was really more or less on my own when it came to making big decisions. Not that I regret that decision. My time at Western was a good one; but it was definitely more about the people I was meeting and the activities I was engaged in more than the academic side of life. As always, studying was a torturous activity for me. I usually slid by with a C in courses without much effort going into them and I was satisfied with that. I remember pulling some all-nighters studying, but on reflection, that was more about experiencing the activity than about earnestly engaging in learning.
Last thing on earth I’d have pictured for myself would be that I would wind up teaching! I have taught adult immigrants since 1998 and love the role of teacher. For me it’s an exercise in creativity. I rarely use books and love the challenge of doing wild and wonderful things in the classroom. This past semester, during Women’s History Month, we had a class where we worked in groups to research some of the history and important women in the Women’s Suffragette Movement. Next class, we did presentations about who they researched. After that, we watched the movie, “Iron Jawed Angels.” That really brought the movement to life for my students, conversation from that was quite animated. We followed that by doing a play I found in a social activism resource book, which proved to be a great experience on so many levels. One satisfaction I got from that was seeing the chorus of women with scarves on their heads protesting "Equal Rights for Women!"
I guess “school” taught me that education is a means of obtaining information, which is a pursuit open to anyone at any time. Boxing up and packaging that education into a school format can deaden the experience for some in ways that make them resistant to further educating themselves. If I wasn’t as unhappy with my work experience as I was, I might never have pursued college at all. Even once I did, I did so for all the wrong reasons. I was much more interested in the “experience” of living away from home and the whole college thing than I was about what I was going to college for. Academically, I chose to major in psychology because I was interested in people, never had I given a thought to what kind of job or career that major would lead to.
I dropped out of college at the end of my junior year during a fondly remembered “peace, love, dope” hippie period of my life. After a few unsettling, menial jobs, I found myself in the graphic arts world for the next 20 years. I worked in a few art studios and then I worked on many newspapers. My claim to fame at one point in 1975 was that I worked on the Reader Newspaper, the free Chicago weekly. I finally ended that phase as a typesetter for a financial printer where I met my husband and happily gave it all up for marriage and having a child. A couple of years into that life, I wound up going back to Northeastern to finish up the last year I had missed and got some generic degree that had combined my life experiences for credit. How funny, I got my degree exactly 20 years after I started college!
Years later, through a weird twist of faith, I had brunch with a bunch of people and the woman I was sitting next to had an administrative job in Harold Washington’s Adult Education department. I was talking about my job at the time, which was working at Schiller School (the one right behind old Cabrini Green) for Sylvan at School; an offshoot of Sylvan Learning Center. Our job was to work with students individually to help them get their reading scores up so they could do better on the tests. This was 1998, before No Child Left Behind. Anyway, she hired me to teach GED part-time at Harold Washington College, one of the seven city colleges in Chicago. However, when I went to work, mystically enough, all the GED positions were filled and they were in need of an ESL teacher, so I got that. I say mystically enough, because upon becoming Buddhist in 1984, I took a trip to Japan, a religious pilgrimage, and while I was there I decided I really wanted to go back there to live. I figured teaching English was a means by which I could do that, so it was something I really wanted to do anyway.
However I came to teaching, it was the right time and right place. I found work I love. I love meeting new people from far away places and learning from them. I love that each year, classes change three times (this keeps me from getting bored, that’s for sure), I love that I can help people become more confident in their speaking abilities so that they can live more comfortably in this culture. And I love that this job enables me to be a lifelong learner on a global scale; learning about other governments, living conditions and societal norms in other countries from the people who have intimate knowledge of the inner workings.
So, where I blame school for turning me off to learning, I love that I now work at a school that provides me a way to make a living, where I can connect with new people all the time, and where I can challenge myself creatively. For now, when I think of school, it's all good:)
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