“Oh, the weather outside is frightful.” the song begins innocuously enough. It isn’t just frightful: it’s cold, sloppy and no fun. It seems to me that aside from experience and knowing better, along with age comes an appreciation for road conditions. Somewhere, around this time of year, it gets old schlepping from work to school, and home again. I live about an hour from the Portland Campus. So, in that already too-spoken-for schedule that exists for us older students, time becomes even more precious. I find myself asking “why?” Why do I want to get my degree? Why go to school?
Snow Days: I want snow days. All my life, I have never had a job that closed when it snowed. I know we live in Maine, and it snows in Maine, but that has gotten old for me. I have worked in retail and I have worked in healthcare. Healthcare, at major New England hospitals, doesn’t stop for the weather. I want snow days, just the same, and summers off too. Am I asking too much?
I want to be a teacher. An English teacher, specifically. I am aware that there is more to teaching than snow days, but I am 44 and cold. Snow days are my carrot on a stick. Summers off, for me, are the cookie at the end of my run.
I started out my time at USM wanting to be a business major. It is what everyone else told me I should do. I belong to that generation of women for whom traditionally male occupations were just opening. They told me to be an engineer, they told me I could run the country if I tried hard enough.
All of a sudden I had so many choices thrust on me. I picked one that offers low pay, long hours and that requires not just a degree, but a Masters degree as well. It’s going to take a while.
Hence the motivational speech I give myself this time of year about snow days and summers off.
Wanting to be a teacher might have something to do with my first grade teacher, Mrs. Ostrow. She taught me to read, which is when my love affair with words began. Right there in room 103 at Unity Drive Elementary School, I discovered words. Written, or spoken, I didn’t discriminate. Mrs. Ostrow finally discovered that by handing me a pencil and paper, I wrote, rather than talked, in class-which made her life easier. I always wanted to be her. I think now, I would like to be someone else’s “Mrs. Ostrow.” The power that she gave to me, by teaching me to read, went beyond what she realized. It took me to Oz, courtesy of Frank L. Baum and on to the prairie, with Laura Ingalls. I found I could go anywhere with a book.
There have been other teachers over the years, who seemed to impact my life as well. They taught me Latin, and grammar. Most recently, I have learned about the nuances that punctuation lends to the written word (thanks, Willard). All of which really cement for me how powerful words can be. I want to pass that on. To have a voice, and to help someone find his or her own, would be the greatest gift I could give.
As I wax about my lofty desires to be a teacher, I am rudely brought back to my overwhelming desire for snow days. Having to interrupt writing to fetch my yapping dogs from the yard, real life, once again, has stepped into academia. My thoughts about impacting others’ lives are quickly replaced with thoughts of watching the bottom of the television screen with my eight year old and having a snow day. In this way, I go on with the pursuit of my degree here at USM. What ever it takes, right?