Some of my story...
Since 2005, I have been an English professor at Mercer County Community College in West Windsor, New Jersey, and I wrote this bio thinking of students who can’t yet tell their post-college-degree life stories. They don’t need me to tell mine with all the rough spots sanded smooth.
I majored in English literature at Williams College in Massachusetts where I especially liked writing ambitious papers I could barely control. My senior year, I wrote a collection of short stories as my honors thesis and my professor, the novelist Jim Shepard, observed, “Bettina, reading your writing makes me feel like Wile E. Coyote trying to keep up with Road Runner.” For those who don’t know these 20th-Century cartoon characters, the coyote endlessly pursues a really fast bird called the roadrunner across a Southwestern landscape. He never catches it. When he gets close, the roadrunner levitates momentarily, “meep meeps” a trademark taunt, and disappears into a cloud of speed-dust.
Jim used his generous imagination to help me understand the effect of my writing. “I see you waving to me from on
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top of a mesa far away in the distance, and I have no idea how you got there.” His feedback woke me up to the need to revise more, but self-focused and independent-minded writer that I was, it took me a good long while to become proficient. I tell this anecdote to my students a lot because, now that I teach composition, I realize how many writers start out as roadrunners.
I graduated with my bachelor’s degree not really knowing what to do next. I wanted to live in Boston, though, so I moved there and found roommates and an apartment. To pay the rent, I took the first job I could get with a company that sold plants and a watering service to downtown corporate offices. I wore a green apron and carried a watering can. It was more than just watering plants, however. I also trimmed yellow and brown edges off of leaves. In one office, I had to clamber up on people’s desks to reach hanging plants, and they only spoke to me when I accidentally spilled water on their papers.
At an insurance company, a man with a private office had a framed photograph of a beautiful Victorian house next to the plant I needed to water, and I ventured to tell him how nice the house looked. “I keep that right in front of me,” he said, “so I remember why I have this job.” That made quite an impression on me, and he in turn was shocked to discover I had a college degree. The next time I saw him, he gave me a catalog for graduate programs at Harvard University. I left that job shortly after that, but it mattered. I learned I did not want to be invisible, and that insurance manager, a stranger, nudged me in the direction of graduate school even though in college I had confidently told a professor I had no interest.
Eventually I found the first job that used my education, teaching English at a private high school in the Boston area for students with learning disabilities. These students modeled so much determination and courage, I decided I could pursue a Ph.D. to become a professor. The inspirational experience I had as a high school teacher stayed with me at the University of California, Santa Barbara and kept me focused on graduate research related to teaching. In my dissertation, Interpretation and Pedagogy: Faulkner and the Pragmatics of Reading, I analyzed students creating meaning amidst the pressures of an institutional context, dynamics overlooked by the usual methods of literary scholarship.
As I got nearer to completing my Ph.D., the difficult job market for people in my field suggested I should put my all into my career. Instead, already married seven years and ready to be a parent, I decided my career did not own all of me. I had my miraculous daughter, finished my dissertation, and moved with my husband to New Jersey. I first encountered the mind-expanding diversity of New Jersey as an English professor at DeVry University in North Brunswick. Of course, I mean racial, ethnic, and economic diversity, but also my sudden immersion in a new culture focused on business and technology. Unlike UCSB, there were no English majors on campus and as I experienced the many differences between myself and my students, I learned to consider others’ perspectives more deeply. An essay about my positive teaching experience there appeared in Profession 2002, a Modern Language Association publication. (For the curious, “English Studies and the Value-Added Discourse of Business at a For-Profit University.”)
At Mercer County Community College, I continue to learn from students and colleagues. Having started life as a reserved bookworm, the rigors and pleasures of the classroom have made me a high-functioning introvert. I am proud to say I have reached a level where I am able to sing for my students if I think it will help or amuse them. Once, a class of mine was discussing how students can know what they know before exams, and I related how my high school AP Biology friends and I composed a song to the tune of "Home on the Range" as a mnemonic to remember information about genetic diseases. Decades later, I still know it. “Oh give me a gene on the fat-lipid scene,” I sang, and continued through the whole thing, well enough for listeners to recognize the melody but poorly enough to earn both laughter and applause.
Students have dreams, and I was there once, too. In high school, I wanted to be a writer, in college I started, and along the way I became a teacher. Now, on this website, I am both, teacher and writer.