With the close of last school year, I completed my 30th campaign in education. Each of those years has been filled with joy and sorrow, challenges and successes, ups and downs and a ton of stories worth sharing. My (True) Life in Education Thus Far will detail 30 or so of those stories. I hope you enjoy them as much as I enjoyed living (most) of them!
WHERE IT BEGAN, I CAN BEGIN TO KNOWIN’
August 3, 2022
Throughout my high school years, I wanted to be a teacher. Specifically, I wanted to teach high school English and direct high school plays. In the playbills accompanying the performances I was in during my high school stage career (and what a career I thought it was! I let anyone who read my bio what my goals were.
I majored in English and Secondary Education at The Catholic University of America, did my student teaching my senior year, graduated with my degree, applied to local DC, Maryland and Virginia schools – primarily Catholic schools – and got 2 interviews. From those interviews, I received 1 job offer, to teach out of my discipline at a school whose reputation was not sterling. I told myself I could teach English anywhere or I could teach Theology (the job I was offered) in a perfect situation. Taking on both challenges felt like a bridge too far for my 22-year-old psyche and I passed on the position, instead taking a job at a DC Not for Profit.
That lasted just over 2 months.
In early October, I got a phone call from Bishop McNamara High School, a Catholic, Holy Cross school. They had had an English teacher who was newly hired not pan out and needed a replacement. I had applied to McNamara in the spring of my senior year at CUA and was thrilled to get the call.
As I remember it, and many of the blogs this year will likely have that caveat because I know that I have forgotten, embellished and/or invented many details of the stories I will share, I interviewed with English Department Chair Al Odierno and Principal Matt Goyette on a Friday and was offered the job before I got home. The message was waiting for me on our answering machine. On tape. I wish I kept it. I started the following Monday.
It was an amazing situation for me, and I was too inexperienced to realize it at the time.
Bishop McNamara had, just that fall, gone co-ed. La Reine High School, an all girls school, had closed the prior spring and McNamara invited those students and other girls to join them, integrating boys and girls at the school for the first time. If this was mentioned in my interview, I do not remember. During the 3 decades to follow, I would find myself in an all boys setting, an all girls setting, back in the DC area for years and in a co-education setting in my various positions. McNamara was the perfect start.
And I simply loved being there. I have such wonderful memories of the two years I spent the first time I was a Mustang!
