Making A Difference
Roy Bohlin, Professor -
Curriculum and Instruction
Director, Center for the Enhancement of Teaching and Learning
My parents, children of immigrants from eastern and northern Europe, were first- generation Americans. My father was orphaned at age 12. Feeling lost at age 17, he dropped out of high school and joined the Navy. He was too young to enlist, so his older brother convinced the Navy recruiter that my father was 18. A year later, he met my future mother. After a two-week courtship, they married, without her parents’ permission. Angry, her mom notified the school. With less than a month to go before graduation, my mother was forced to drop out of school. In those days, a married woman wasn’t allowed to attend a parochial school.
When I shared my uncertainty about college with an adult friend, he assured me “You’re making the right choice. Life with a college education will be much better than your family has experienced and the jobs your friends settled for.”
I was born as part of the first big wave of post-war Baby Boomers, in the Brooklyn Naval Hospital. Our family soon moved to the lower east side of Manhattan. In the shadow of the Williamsburg Bridge, our neighborhood was changing rapidly. The crowded conditions and the decrepit, dirty hallway and stairs of the aged buildings were evidence of its decline. Sharing the fourth floor, and the only toilet facilities, with us were immigrants: a hot dog vendor from Portugal, a family from Puerto Rico, and a Jewish family from Poland— their daughter was my first crush. I walked Paula to school nearly every day in second grade until her family moved to a nicer neighborhood.
A year later, we moved three blocks to Clinton Street near where that same busy bridge emptied onto Delancy Street. The apartment was larger and cleaner. However, nearly every Friday night, police cars lined up as neighborhood gangs “faced off” in an empty lot across the street. Assuredly, someone had been killed or seriously injured. If the gangs couldn’t find a gun, they manufactured one, which was as likely to blow up in the shooter’s hand as fire the bullet.
When I was ten years old, my mother insisted we move out of the city. She and my father, a merchant marine, gave up their jobs and we left for rural northwest Ohio, a place they hoped would be a better environment for me to grow up in. What a change for me, from the culture of the biggest city to a Midwest town of 500 people. Classmates ridiculed my “foreign” accent and I worked hard to lose it. I enjoyed the open spaces and learned the new sports and games that helped me to be slowly accepted. My abilities in math and science surprised and pleased students and teachers. Of course, humor always helped. Though I was very shy, I found comfort and power in making other children laugh. Within four years, they voted me class president, though I was still considered by many to be an outsider from New York.
These years were tough times. When my aunt, who is African-American visited, there were vibrations of rejection in this all-white community. There wasn’t much work for a merchant marine in the middle of Ohio, and a recession was in progress, so steady jobs were difficult for my parents to find. An unexpected pregnancy brought my younger brother into a family that couldn’t afford another child. I had to give up many of my school activities to baby sit or clean house while my mother worked, or take after school jobs myself to contribute financially to the family. Money for college seemed out of the question.
Yet, to say that I was encouraged to do well in school would be an understatement. The one time I got a B, I was grounded for a month. Despite our lack of financial resources, the expectation was that I would go to college. I never questioned it. But I never really had any idea what it might mean either and neither did my parents.
By the time I found out that you needed to apply early in your senior year, the closest and most affordable state university had closed enrollment. The only way to get accepted was to apply to the Honors Program. With a letter of recommendation from one of my teachers, I was accepted to Bowling Green State University. Admission to the Honors Program came with a small scholarship of $150. Having graduated from high school, the first in my family to do so, I had just turned 17 and my age made finding a job to help with college expenses difficult. I found some weekend work and occasional jobs, and received student loans so I was able to pay for tuition, room and board. A 10-hour per week job in the Chemistry Department allowed me a small amount of spending money.
Coming home from school at times, I saw my friends, who didn’t go to college, working good-paying factory jobs and driving brand new cars. They wore great clothes and had an enormous amount of spending money. I was working twice as hard with little to show for it. When I shared my uncertainty about college with an adult friend, he assured me “You’re making the right choice. Life with a college education will be much better than your family has experienced and the jobs your friends settled for.” Boy, was he ever right!
I did well in school, and while I didn’t always get the grade I thought I deserved, I finished my freshman year with a 3.0 GPA while taking physics, mathematics, and chemistry. But I never felt like I belonged. Many of the students were wealthy. Many knew ways to find out about previous tests given by instructors. Many had such an attitude of superiority. They were so certain of everything they did.
At the end of my first year of college, the evening before my spring semester final exams, my mother called to tell me she was getting a divorce. I’d always been the fixer in the family, the one to keep the relationships stable, yet I told everyone my parents’ divorce had no effect on me. During my sophomore year, I skipped classes, slept in, and partied. I grew my hair long. I was angry at a lot of things. My grades collapsed to a 1.0 GPA. I was in danger of flunking out. I changed my major from Chemistry to Mathematics and back again, but neither of those fields set off a passion in me. I was starting to realize I needed a job I could look forward to and feel passionate about; something in which I could make a difference; something where I could work with people and help them. I decided on teaching.
With this new found focus and desire to make a difference in the world, I applied myself. By my senior year, I had pulled my grades back up and was receiving mostly A’s. I completed my student teaching and became a teacher, but my college experience didn’t stop there. I felt many times that earning a Bachelor’s degree was enough college, but eventually I saw that with a little more work, more doors would open, and I could have more opportunities to make an even greater impact. As a teacher, I could affect the lives of hundreds of students a year. Then, as a teacher of teachers, I could affect hundreds and hundreds of children a year. Now, working with the teachers of teachers, I’m hopefully making an even greater difference in our future.
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