Education

Well, again I think I took the safe way, I didn’t take risks, I wasn’t a risk taker. I did what was expected. I think that I sort of fell into the work that I do, so I continue to look for my purpose and remind myself that life is a journey; it’s not a destination, you don’t arrive, you’re always continuing that journey.

I really loved it here [Assumption College]. I have made, I made a great group of friends and, in fact, this past weekend I was on the Cape with my, my “Assumption Girls” as I call them. There’s seven of us that go away at least once a year and you just feel like these are women that I really bonded with, but we’re different, we live in different places, we’ve had different experiences as far as marriages or anything else, but when push comes to shove these are people that I can count on in my life.

That’s the really, really, really hard part and I think that as women go, it’s so much harder for us. And I’m not like going to beat on men or be negative at all about a man’s role in life, but it’s very challenging to find balance, if not impossible to find balance, and I, as a woman, continually feel that I’m not doing enough or I’m not good enough or I feel guilt if I shortchange one area in my life or one person in my life. And sometimes it does get upsetting and frustrating when sometimes it feels like, as a woman you feel like you have to do so much more to be viewed as equal or as competent as maybe a male counterpart.

They told me, 'You should go to college,' and at that point I was 38. So thought, 'It is over for me, I can’t, are you crazy? I can’t go to school now.' And they said, 'Why not?' And that is how I began my educational journey as a late learner, an adult learner.

My first year [teaching] here, I must add, was difficult because they [the Assumption College students] were still all male. They were going to start accepting women the following year. And I remember when I first walked into one classroom, it was Intermediate French, and it was all boys, of course boys, men. And I could tell from their reaction that they thought Assumption had hit bottom, that Assumption College was really going to the dogs. They were against it; you know, the men who were here at the time did not want [the school] to accept women…… Let me say that that first year was interesting because I was teaching intermediate French and I was also teaching a senior seminar. And the senior seminar went famously, again all men. And I enjoyed them, and I am still in touch with some of them. But the Intermediate French [class]-they didn’t want to be there for one thing, you know when you really don’t want to study French, but you have to because it was the rule at the time that you had to have so many semesters of a foreign language. And then to have a woman in front of you besides. So that was a humbling experience, and it was balanced, luckily, by the senior seminar. They were more mature, they were leaving anyway, they were not going to have to worry about having women in the classrooms with them. And then in the second semester, I began teaching at Clark. And that was very important for me because the students at Clark were used to having women in front of them, you know as professors.