The light is turned on and I feel the brightness despite my eyes being closed. “Get up! It’s 6 a.m.!” my mom yells. This meant it was 5:30 a.m. and my mother was doing her daily routine of trying to make my brother and me think we are running late for school.
In about five minutes, she re-enters the room and takes the blankets away and tells us, “It’s almost 7 a.m.!” I finally wake up, walk to the bathroom haphazardly and take a shower to get ready for school.
Parental education background is often asked in college and graduate school applications. It serves as a proxy to understand the educational background of the applicant. Is the student first-generation? Is the student’s family educated? However, it doesn’t allow for further context of parental background to be considered. I wasn’t embarrassed to check that she had only a high school education, but it did make me think about what that meant.
I attribute my career in education to my mother, a preschool teacher’s aide at a small Catholic elementary school in the Bronx. After graduating high school, she spent the rest of her life doing everything she could to support her two children.
Relentless in making sure my brother and I went to Catholic, private school, my mother worked multiple jobs in the school to make that happen. She worked the breakfast program at 6:30 a.m., was a teacher’s aide from 8 a.m.-2:30 p.m. and then worked the after-school program until 6 p.m. Because of her schedule, I practically lived in the school, and the teachers and administrators were like extended family to me.
Education was more than a pathway to success for me – it became my calling. It just took a while for me to accept it.
My mother was the aide when I was in pre-K. I was not allowed to get in trouble because I did not want to get embarrassed around my friends with my mom yelling at me in school. I remember dreading showing her my homework because I was sloppy, and she would make me re-do it if it wasn’t up to her standards. Eventually, I think she accepted that my penmanship wasn’t going to get much better. All throughout elementary school, I avoided conflict and getting into (too much) trouble, because my mom was always there.
