Eureka 1

Eureka Moment #1

In 1985 I became a single parent which necessitated finding a job. After a long search, I found a job as a Home Economics teacher in a private, catholic high school. 

This is a photo of me and one of my 12th grade students (middle left).

The problem was that I was not a New York State, certified school teacher. I only had Scottish certification to teach Domestic Subjects at all grades. On investigation, I found out that I had earned enough credits to obtain a provisional certification in Home Economics from the state department of education. But it came with a stipulation that in order to become permanently certified, I needed to obtain a Master’s degree within five years. I attended the State University of New York (SUNY) from 1988 until 1991.

After a lot of arguing, pleading and paying for my Scottish credentials to be translated into American credentials, I was finally admitted into a special graduate program for schoolteachers. There was one stipulation. My first course had to be in one of the mandatory disciplines, and I needed to obtain a B average for both the first and the second course, before I would be allowed to matriculate. Since I was teaching full time and had two teenagers at home, I could only attend the university on Saturday mornings or during the summer vacations. It took three years.

I registered for “American Literature and Commentary on Slavery”, and I found it difficult. I had studied “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” and “Tom Sawyer” when I was about fourteen years old, and these were books that I didn’t want to read again. Also, although Toni Morrison is a Nobel Prize and Pulitzer Prize winning novelist, her books were not to my liking back then.  Recently I read “Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl,” by Harriet Ann Jacobs. I’m glad I finally read it but it did not expand my knowledge on the history of American slavery. I managed to read “Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass” but the whole experience was tedious.

I knew I was going to fail the course, but one of the other students in the class who saw me struggling gave me some advice.

            “This professor doesn’t want to hear your opinions, just regurgitate what he says right back to him, and you should get better grades on your papers.”

The advice worked and I forced myself to learn American grammar, punctuation and spelling so that I could get the precious B and earn that Master’s Degree. My time at the university was mostly uneventful except for two courses: these were “Family and Troubled Adolescents” and Chemistry in Human Culture”, both of which affected the course of my life to a large extent.

Dr. M  , although very controversial, was a marvelous teacher. He was a family therapist and he and his colleagues had decided to follow a different course of therapy for their private practice patients. They felt that they were getting better results with the new therapy than they did with the usual the prescribed course of therapy for troubled families. The American Medical Association (AMA) disapproved of these therapies but Dr. M  was quite open about the fact that although his therapies raised a lot of eyebrows, he didn’t care. He believed that his patients needed to relive the tortured events of their childhood by proxy, in order to effect a cure, and it worked.

The first eye-opener for me was when he introduced the class to something called a Genogram.

Excerpt off the web http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genogram

A genogram (also known as a McGoldrick-Gerson study ^[1] or a Lapidus Schematic ^[1]) is a pictorial display of a person's family relationships and medical history. It goes beyond a traditional family tree by allowing the user to visualize hereditary patterns and psychological factors that punctuate relationships.^[1] It can be used to identify repetitive patterns of behavior and to recognize hereditary tendencies.

The class was instructed to construct their own Genogram but he didn’t want to see any of them. They are too personal, and I was glad, because after looking at mine I was shocked. The Eureka moment came when Dr. M  explained that each person is the result of all that we had listed on our own Genograms. We don’t evolve by chance; we are the result of all that has happened to us. We are the result of all the people we have ever known and we are the result of the people and the history in our families going back through the generations. Wow! My Genogram had a lot of red on it. It was an eye opener because it was only then that I understood what had happened to produce me. Deaths, pandemics, wars, diseases, alcoholism, etc. At that moment I felt glad to be alive and totally amazed that after all of that history, I was at now sitting in my right mind, with a healthy body in an American University earning a Master’s Degree. 

I’ve used Dr. M ’s therapies on myself over the years and they do work, although I’m the only person who knows what issues I’ve managed to resolve with his help from so long ago.

The second Eureka moment occurred in the chemistry class. It was 1989 and I was anxious to finish. By that time I had a better job working in the public school system and as soon as I finished my degree, my salary would increase by $5,000 per year. The only thing not yet completed was one of the compulsory science courses. The only available compulsory science course on a Saturday morning was chemistry, but there was a prerequisite. Only those with an undergraduate degree in a science discipline could be admitted to this graduate course in chemistry. I registered anyway because there was nothing else available and nobody checked my qualifications. I knew that I had the option to drop out if chemistry turned out to be too difficult for me as I was sure it would be, but I thought that I would give it a try anyway.

The whole experience was surreal. I hadn’t studied chemistry since high school and I never liked it. Chemistry at high school was sheer torture for me. Once more the professor at SUNY was an outstanding teacher. I liked him and I liked his teaching style. The professor was Indian but he had been educated in the United Kingdom. With a sigh of relief I realized I might be able to handle this, because the professor taught British style. He gave us homework every week and the requirements for passing this course were three one hundred question exams, plus an oral presentation together with a 20 page report due the last week of the course.

Sixty people signed up for chemistry and three months later there were only twenty of us left in the class. I managed to pass because the test questions were multiple choices and I could usually figure out which answer was the correct one. The professor liked my oral presentation because I made props. I drew large colorful diagrams for my presentation and at the end of the course he gave me an A.  After receiving the results of the first written test, I had my eureka moment.  I had managed to answer all one hundred questions correctly. Were these lucky guesses or was I really good at chemistry? I did study hard for those three months but even with study how many people get an A in graduate chemistry? This was proof to me that I had some kind of brain and it changed my attitude about myself forever.

Later when I decided to give up teaching, I saw an ad for a job.

“Wanted, a nutritionist with a background in biochemistry for a company that manufactures nutraceuticals.”

I applied and got the job because I was able to produce a transcript proving that I had received an A in chemistry, an A in botany and an A in biology. Who knew!