The Beginning
It all began when I was born on July 25th, 1959. I was born on a Saturday which according to the
birthday poem, a “Saturday’s child was to work hard for a living ..."
I got married at the young age of 19 and had my daughter, Heather Marie, at 20.
She attended the USM daycare and was known as “Little Bit”. I started out in Psychology, but being
a mother did not see making the commitment to a PhD so I could be a school psychologist. So, I
added on Elementary Education to make a double major. My first teaching job was at Stone Jr. High
in Wiggins in remedial reading for 7th and 8th graders. After that year, I got divorced and moved
back to Hattiesburg.
After 3 months of moving back to Hattiesburg, I got an opportunity in Laurel with a program based
on a grant that lets the student do work for required objectives, take the test for it and complete all
objectives for that grade level at their own pace. Students could work through 2 grade levels in one
year if they worked hard. Then, I worked at the alternative school division of Oak Park Elementary
for 2 years. This division was eventually moved beside the high school when Laurel City Schools
and Jones County split from the alternative school near the Sawmill Mall. with the Laurel City
Alternative school and Junior High school, I taught the remedial subjects of math, reading, English,
and sometimes history. I continued to work at Oak Park Elementary for the next few years in
kindergarten and third grade.
Next, I was at the Laurel City Alternative school when they broke off with the Pine Belt Educational
Center (Jones Co.) where my daughter went to school. The alternative school here was just
beginning and was finding way. It had students that were from the high school in one room and the
elementary and junior high division in a small room next door. I had students that had come from
the elementary schools, mostly because of behavior from 4 th -6 th and the junior high (7th-8th).
Some of the junior high students had been to training school more than once or had been in trouble
with the law for burglary.I had one male that was on 8 th grade level at 17 years old. I had to do
lesson plans for math, history, and English for 5 different grade levels. The 4th -6th graders had to
be given work to do while I lectured to the 7 th -8 th graders, and vise-versa. I know the given the
technology we have at our disposal today, I could have captured even the toughest students’
attention. All we had in terms of technology was an ancient computer that used the floppy disk we
have today and the old black floppy that read in DOS. Fortunately, my brother had a computer that
could copy from the hard floppy disk to the black one. As a reward we had some games such as
Wheel of Fortune and Hang Man which could be considered educational and entertainment rolled
into one. While I was working at the Laurel City Alternative school that year (1996), my daughter
got killed in a car accident. I was a single mother raising my only daughter by myself. I threw
myself into my work and made it through the year. I went to Laurel to move in with a teacher friend
of mine that had gotten divorced. We both worked at Jones Jr. High that next year. She did career
discovery and I did remedial math (Saxon) and English.
At the end of 1998, I decided to “retire” and go to Australia. My friend I had lived with the previous
year, Melinda, had met her future husband chatting in the virtual community called Excite Talk!
There you could show a picture called an avatar. This could be chosen from those in stock or made
in a program. You could even capture on of yourself if you wanted to use your own personal avatar.
For a while we had the ability to hear audio when in the chat room. We could actually hear each
other talking. Once this became a hit, of course, it became something you had to purchase to use. As
with all world really got me into computers with a passion. When I went to Australia, I met some of
the people I had gotten to know over those first 2 years of having my own computer.
As with many good things, it came to an end and I had to come home from Australia. I did manage to
stay there for 7 months. I had left at the end of summer 1998 here, and went through the seasons
of spring and summer in Australia. When I came home in May of 1999, it was again spring leading to
summer in the U.S. I had successfully missed winter for a year!! That summer in 1999, I got a job
teaching a reduced class of first graders which was a grant to see if reduced class size helped. That
year I got to work with Susan Malone on a project called Using Technology in Education. It had
people from USM going to teachers in several surrounding counties to work with them on
incorporating computer technology in the classroom. With my first graders I ended up making a web
site through Geocities using their poems and stories along with their art work and personal picture
to “publish” their work. We also made a “class” story, which we wrote together and made the
corresponding artwork, called the Magic School Bus (along the lines of the Flying School Bus
combined with an actual class trip to Kamper Park. I had made the web site to be able to put more
work on for each year I taught at Woodley Elementary School in Hattiesburg. The coming of Direct
Instruction, which uses a “script” that has to be strictly read using repetition of facts, it did not
leave time for creative works of art or literature to be added to my web site. After 3 years of Direct
Instruction, I found that I was getting “burned-out” as a teacher. Things in my life happened to lead
me to getting into the Mater’s Program at USM in Instructional Technology. I hope to be able to find
many paths to pursue with this degree, in addition to possibly working with the student population,
using the marvelous advancements that instructional technology is evolving.
