Category: photography

my mother has a graduate degree from an HBCU

courtesy of Texas taxpayers to support motivated public school teachers

Both my parents were Texas schoolteachers in what I consider to be transitional times in the mid twentieth century when teachers in public schools were respected members of their communities, paid less than other professions but valued for their contributions to the greater good. As their daughter I often attended the schools where they were employed, but only once was I ever a student in one of their classes. That was my mother’s music class when I was in the seventh grade in our home town of Richards, and I was totally humiliated by her teaching techniques and interaction with me and my friends. My first year as a teenager and my mom’s first teaching position didn’t mix well. Dinnertime at our house was colder than the sweet iced tea.

Both my parents worked on different college degrees for as long as I was in school. My mom and dad did their undergraduate work at Sam Houston State Teachers College (now Sam Houston State University) in Huntsville; Dad also completed his master’s degree there. Mom commuted the twenty-five miles from Richards to Huntsville for classes when I started the third grade – Dad did the same commute when he finished his undergraduate degree at Sam, then master’s. When I was in college at the University of Texas in Austin, Dad finally got his doctorate at the University of Houston after five years of commuting to the campus from Brazoria and three years commuting from Rosenberg, Texas. The GI bill he earned in WWII allowed him to pursue his dreams of higher education, and the Texas taxpayers helped with his costs, too.

does this topic seem boring to you?

As the person who typed each excruciating word on an old Royal manual typewriter, I can testify it was less than an entertaining read. Learning the appropriate format for footnotes, credits, blah blah blah wasn’t fun, either. I must have used hundreds of bottles of white out that summer I devoted to my dad’s dissertation and while my dad thanked his advisor profusely in the acknowledgements, be aware I didn’t have any gratitude for the man responsible for the many rewrites he made to the manuscript that required typing the same material over and over again. And then over again.

Two teachers in the house made education a must for the daughter who vowed to choose any career over teaching but never say never. I taught at a community college here in South Carolina for five years from 1982-87 and was grateful to the taxpayers of the state for paying for my master’s degree at the University of South Carolina. Apples for the teacher don’t roll far from the tree.

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Slava Ukraini. For the children.