Education

It means a lot.  I think it’s an opportunity for me to use my skills and my knowledge from my years of schooling, but I get to connect with people on an individual level on a daily basis, and really have the honor of [their] telling me their struggles, working through that with them, and giving them the skills to be their own therapist in the future so they don’t need to come back. It’s also really important to me to have work/life balance, because I do have two little kids, and the work I do gives me the ability to be home with them when I need to, and work when I want to.

So, there is no question that when they come back, I remember. You know, as a teacher and that’s a long memory, so that’s pretty good. But the connections, there’s no question about it. The connections that you make with the children, with their families. I feel as though it’s—again, that community, and I think the parents—I feel very strongly in working in a partnership with parents. It’s vital. Absolutely vital. And so, we’ve been fortunate enough, at Bancroft, that I think that that connection happened and can happen at any school. I’m glad that can happen there. But, I think that working in a partnership with parents, on behalf of their children, is probably what I think has really meant a lot. And the children, they are so unique and I always feel that there’s a child, with problems or misbehaving, or whatever, I used to say, “Okay, what am I doing? Why is that happening?” It’s not, “I’ve got to figure it out.” It’s not that the child has to figure it out, I have to figure it out how to get to that child. And so that’s that puzzle, that’s what keeps it always exciting I think, “What can I do?”  

I have a lot to say about women and education. I think there is such pushes to—I don’t even know how to put this. I think that my biggest challenge from kindergarten to defending my PhD thesis. Why don’t you talk more? Why don’t you smile more? Right, I think there’s such—it’s hard to crack past that. It’s hard to yell over the guy who’s saying nothing, but saying a lot of it and getting all the attention. I think that’s really tough. And I found that and some of it is personality and some of it is gender.  There’s plenty of women who are falling off their chairs answering questions, but I found that the professors I worked with, it wasn’t really male culture it was either patronizing or it was diminishing. I could not wait till when I came here. And Mark got his job and he was teaching, and I was finishing up, I couldn’t wait to get out of Princeton. Smith was fine [laughs]. Smith should have prepared me for the rest of it.

I belonged to the Women's Alliance which was a feminist group that I wanted to see what that was like.  So we would end up talking about what we were studying a lot and that always—I learned about myself.  That was always beneficial for me because I learned about myself. Even in my current jobs I still see this.  It’s sort of the abstract ideas that give me energy again.  Like what I do in my job to a great extent is supervise a whole bunch of volunteers and supervise employees and write grants and do budgets and write fundraising letters and all these things. But when I want to sort of get energized again about doing it, and I love doing all that stuff, and I'm not really a scholar, but if I go and I read in the field, like if I go and do some research to present a talk, if I do some historical research, or when I was working running an art center, I would go to the college art association and just hear art history [laughs].  That gave me a bunch of energy and so for me that was a big part of the mentoring groups there. 

Find out what your potential is and build on it, and always have a secondary skill that you can fall back on, and go to conferences, get out, make connections, network. I can’t express the importance of networking, especially in women's groups.  I try to do that. Once you get out of your environment and go into a different, a whole different—a national conference, and you get so excited and people come back so elevated.  And so what if you’re energetic? If you a win a few, lose a few, you know?  At least you made a start and you’re a changed individual.

I sort of feel what happened in my poems, I write about hurt, and I wonder maybe—and sadness, especially hurt in my poems—because other people in my family couldn’t.  I think that’s why I write or why I have things to write about because I’m feeling [what] other people are not able to express, but also I’m expressing things for them.

There wasn’t any swim team for girls back then. My parents were able to talk the swim coach at the Lincoln Square Boys Club into having me coming down and it would be just me. He would watch me swim and make corrections. And then give me a workout to do, which I would try to get done, at the Whitinsville Community Center. The YW [YWCA] found their pool on Chatham Street was donated to with the stipulation that there would be no girls competitive swim team. If they wanted to do synchronized swimming, that was okay, but you couldn’t do no racing. So, the only time I could get in there would be when there was an open swim, and then I would have to swim around people to do a lane. And my coach at Lincoln Square Boys Club would call my house and say, “The executive director’s not here today, I can sneak you in.” [laughs] So, then I’d rush down to the Boys Club and have him watch me. And he’d give me a workout and sometimes I would be doing it with the boys on the Boy’s Club team.

I would say that you should surround yourself with a great support system, and not be afraid to pursue what you feel passionate about.  I kind of like laugh to myself when I say that because,  every day I sort of struggle with that, too, because there’s a lot that I’m passionate about and,  it’s hard to just stay focused and go in this one direction. You also have a lot of things to think about, like supporting a family and—but I think that you can find a balance between being secure financially and supporting your family, but also being able to do what you really love. And I would encourage anybody to—women, men, anybody who just feels passionate about something to pursue that even if it means that you might have to do that in addition to something else, which is kind of what I’m doing right now. So [laughs] working in two different places, but I feel really passionate about what I’m doing so I’m just trying to find the balance there. 

I had this one gentleman come in, he was homeless, came into the courthouse. He wore overalls. He had something in every pocket. He had a jean jacket with pockets—everything had pockets. Everything he owned was on him. He had a beard down to here, a walking stick. No hygiene, you know, he lived on the street. It was raining; it was wet. He smelled. You know, it was just horrible.  And the people I work with, some of the people were just like, “Oh, I can’t take this. I can’t do it.” Like, right in front of the person. And this is a human being. First of all, it’s embarrassing, and I remember I took the wand, and I was like, “Sir, come over here,” and I said, “Let me see your jacket.” I was going through his jacket. I’m going through all this stuff, and this is what he owned. It’s nothing to us, but this is what he owned—his possessions—and it meant stuff to him. So, I took it, and I put it in a little box, and I told him, “I’m putting everything in here. Here is a ticket for it.I promise you will get this back.” And I didn’t make a big deal out of it. He goes and does his whatever he had to do in court and about an hour later, he leaves. I give him his box and things. He comes back the next day.  Here’s this homeless guy, was living on the street, like not near the courthouse, I don’t know where it was in Worcester. He walked all the way back that day just to thank me for treating him like a human being. And I was like, "Why wouldn’t I?"

I would probably tell them to not be afraid to speak up whether it’s for yourself or someone else about an issue no matter what. And then also not to be afraid to take risks because I think a lot of—at least I feel like a lot of women are—we’re not risk takers. And I don’t know what it is, whether we are afraid to fail or we are afraid that we are not good enough. I’m not sure. But I don’t think you should be afraid to take a risk because even if you don’t succeed you’re learning something from it. And again, speaking up because I think that unless you can give yourself a voice, nobody else is going to give you one.