Education

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.

I think that my generation of women are the ones that were able to start looking at themselves as individuals and were not bound by a lot of conventions that our mothers had to deal with. We were products of growing up in the 50s and 60s and that was the time when all types of things were possible to people. We were the ones that had job opportunities opened up. During the 60s and the 70s, it was a really exciting time. Women were not bound by the traditional rules, and were clearly not allowing ourselves to do that. So we flocked to education. And we were the biggest group of women who started coming into education and really sort of changed where we went.

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.

Probably when I was younger, success was defined more externally by allowing other people’s opinions to determine whether or not I was successful. The older I get, the more internal the definition has become and it’s really, do I feel good about what I did today or what I did this week.

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.

What I found is that it is difficult to balance [both] businesses but also with family life. Because it is always a juggling act and it is for everybody. And there is no instruction manual on how to do it…and you know if you have a deadline and have two kids sick with the chicken pox, you have to find a way to balance the act. Not only balancing but keeping a happy home life and realizing this is life. And life's not a destination but a journey.

Go for it. Just absolutely, whatever your dream is or what you think your dream is, go for it, give it a try. And look at life as opportunities, meet people, make connections. I think that's the other thing, making connections with people and really appreciating who they are and looking for the gifts in people, which I love doing. I love doing that here at Holy Cross, because when I meet a student, if they have a talent they don't necessarily like to share it – because they definitely know I'll use it in some other program. People have so much to offer and I think that sometimes you have to look a little bit for it and other times you don't have to look so hard. But there's so much good in people, and everyone has some gift to offer and tapping into that is always really exciting.

It would be really nice if the hearing people could understand the deaf people more, for communication, I think that’s what needs to change. A lot has changed. We have interpreters now. We have a lot of deaf services such as the Mass Rehab Commission. We have the Massachusetts Commission for the Deaf and Hard of Hearing. We have the Center of Living and Working, the Senior Center -- there’s so many services now, not like it was a long time ago.

That’s where discrimination plays in some. When going through public high school I liked math, and I liked sciences, and everybody was equal and there was no issue of discrimination. Going to a women’s college at the time when I was going to college, there were a few schools that I looked at, and this was in an era when there were many more all-women colleges.… so I could have gone to numerous colleges if I wanted to major in education or nursing, but I didn’t and I wanted liberal arts, and I wanted physics or math. So that pretty much geared you towards women’s colleges in that era. I graduated from high school in 1958.

"I think for me success is being challenged with what I’m doing … it’s more the challenge of doing something interesting and helping someone else. And I always felt that about education while working here at Assumption, that I was helping adult students get their lives back on track or retool to get a new career. And then later with the older students I really felt like I was making a big difference in the latter half of their lives. They would tell me things like, 'I don’t know what I would be doing if I didn’t have WISE to come to.' So for me, it was to be able to offer something to other people and to be challenged with something new. And that is what I am finding now with my new career, as I slowly build up this business, that it’s nice to be challenged and I still like to be doing something that is helping other people hopefully."