100 Posts in 100 Days
It’s Mother’s Day, so let me introduce you to my mom, Kathy Beckley, and the story of how she became a teacher.
Growing up, my mom would tell stories about her own education. She was studious and successful throughout her school career. Reading was a passion and achieving good grades was important. By the time she was a senior in high school, she had earned enough credits that she finished a semester early and entered the work force. Her aspirations were to go to college and she had her heart set on a private college on the other side of the state. She was the oldest of 4 children and the private school was not in the family budget. So, she kept her job. At the age of eighteen, she met and married my dad and when she was nineteen, I was born.
My mom raised my younger sister and I full time until I was in the 5th grade, when she took a part-time job as the secretary at our church. She worked there for a few years before moving to a full time position in an environmental engineering firm. Over time and across 3 or 4 different companies, she became a marketing director, which meant working alongside scientists and engineers to write and edit technical proposals, amongst other things. For a short time, she ran her own technical writing business and she also served on the board of the Society of Marketing Professionals in Seattle.
As her career was growing, I was growing up, which meant moving into classes like algebra, geometry and trigonometry. I did not always find them easy and found that I needed tutoring and an extra heavy dose of effort to make it through them. That brought up my mom’s math story from junior high school, where she had struggled. She was failing her math class and looking for help from her teacher. Not only was he not interested in helping her, he declared that she was incapable in math and the best thing that she could do would be to quit. He told her that if she promised to never take another math class again, he would give her a “B”. The combination of the vote of no-confidence from her teacher and the desire to maintain a high GPA led her to agree to his terms. She made it to that early high school graduation, without another math class.
Until, when in my late teens, her unmet desire for college and her successful career drew her to enroll in community college and earn her AA degree. Pursuing her degree required taking courses in math. It also meant taking a placement test to determine her exact courses. She placed into Math 90, an introductory course that wouldn’t count toward the credits she needed for her degree. Without it, though, she couldn’t gain access to the courses that she did need.
So, there we would be. The 2 of us at the kitchen table working on our homework. Sometimes she was helping me with an essay. Other times, I was taking what I’d learned from tutoring and helping her with math. That work mattered to her and I can visualize the exactness with which she showed her work and explained her answers. She completed Math 90, and every other math course she needed, all with a final grade of “A”.
Fast forward another 20 or so years. My mom is now living in a small town in Montana. When the public schools there needed substitutes, she fulfilled another lifelong dream and became a teacher. She accepted substitute jobs in classrooms of all subjects, in the library, and in the school office. It didn’t take long before she became the preferred substitute for many teachers and was turning down jobs because she was already committed to another one.
Her reputation in the public schools led to a new opportunity: teaching full time in a local Christian school. She would have 2 or 3 different courses and she would also need to take some courses of her own in education. So, at an age that I will only describe as “past the age of retirement”, there she was, teaching kids during the day and going to college online at night. During the pandemic, no less.
It may have taken a lifetime, but my mom has persevered. She has achieved her goals of going to college, becoming a teacher, and proven that she IS good at math. Later this month, she will complete her second year of teaching. As often happens with new teachers and in small schools, the courses she taught this year are different than those she taught last year. They are changing again as she moves into her third year. Guess what she is teaching next year: middle school math.
