1959 was my first year at Skidmore, then I went back to Wingspread. When I came back from Wingspread, Skidmore told me that this year would be my last year since they could not give me tenior. They would help me and give me good recommendations. So after a summer at Wingspread I spect the summer thinking…I am getting to be 30 years old…I made the decision to move to Cincinnati Ohio and choose where to live and then get a job, maybe even bite the bullet and teach in high school. So I did Wingspread and if I was going to move to C and teach in high school or find a job at one of the colleges in the area, I was going to have to do more different course work. So the next two years 1960, 1961, and into 1962 were spent exploring different options for my career going forward.
I discovered that getting a full-time college job was not going to be easy and I would need to bite the bullet and supplement my college teaching in the area by teaching in High school. Besides, I was 30 years old and it didn’t look like I was going to get any good “fall-in-love” prospects for a man to marry me and support me, so I had to start thinking of my future.
Getting a Job in Ohio – My Goal Changes
Ohio had a very good State Teachers Retirement System connected to High School teaching, so I decided that I had to bite the bullet and start teaching high school to become a part of the Ohio STRS to supplement any college teaching. That meant some major changes. I had to start teaching high school full time in order to join STRS. I had to get my Ohio state teaching license. I had to take new career courses in education in order to fulfill the State’s requirements. I remember bitching about that… I had to take courses that I had already taken and/or taught in college in order to get the teaching certificate in Ohio. I took intro to psychology at Marshall College in 1949 or 1950 and ended up taking psychology of speech, psychology of education, and two other psychology courses out of the same book I used in 1949. Four or five different psychology courses out of the same book over 10 years. I was so sick of that book. That was horrible. I also had to take several courses that I had taught in college. The same course. The same textbook. I was not happy about getting my teaching certificate. It took me almost 10 years to get my full teaching certificate.
I don’t know where to tell this story. One interpretation class that I taught at Skidmore I used the book Best Short Stories, but I could not get credit for my teaching certificate. I had to get it on the books at the University of Cincinnati as an English credit. When I took the course, the professor taught it as English and he had us read the stories and he told us what the stories meant and then we were supposed to parrot that back to him. Of course I had different interpretations. So I was not a good girl. So when he told us what the stories meant, I raised my hand and gave him my interpretation of the stories. Long story short, I got a B in the class because I would not parrot back his interpretation.
I taught on a temporary certificate for less money during that 10 years. People that had gotten their bachelor’s degree in teaching got to get the higher salary. I had all the requirements of the subject matter, even teaching these courses. I had a lot of English courses that I had to take.
I could have chosen to register at Xavier University and teach speech and drama at Princeton High School (a 20-25 mile commute), producing four full plays a year, teach four high school classes, take a course at Xavier, and at the end of that year I would have my teaching certificate. I knew I couldn’t have handled that heavy of a schedule. I turned down the job that would have gotten me a teaching certificate in 1 year.
When I left Skidmore in June of 1962, I did it totally on faith. No job, no teaching certificate and other things to figure out. By September of 1962 I had rejected the Xavier offer because it was more than I had the physical ability to handle, and accepted the job at Courter Tech High School, right down the hill from my apartment in Clifton. I never regretted that decision. So I taught at Courter Tech for the next 10 years. I hated taking over 10 years to get my certificate, but it was the right decision.