Education

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.

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.

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.