I had always wanted to be a teacher. When I attended the Ohio Street School in Huron, Ohio, my second grade teacher, Miss Brown. Miss Brown was one of my favorites, and I can almost hear her West Virginia accent in my head even today. My goal in life was to be like her, but one could also say that teaching was part of my DNA. In researching my family’s history, I found educators all the way back to the mid-1850s.
My path toward becoming an educator was a bit circuitous, however. I’ve taught K-12 music in New Hampshire, second graders in a parochial school, and second through fourth grades in an urban, diverse public school system outside of Boston. In between teaching gigs, I sold sheet music, worked as an administrative assistant in an architectural firm, and as a bookkeeper in a software start-up. Education continued to pull at me until I could no longer resist.
I once was a public school educator. Now I’m retired. It really is the same thing, only I can sleep in - a little.