gender roles were not clearly differentiated. My mother and father always worked together.
My father cooked and cleaned when he had to and helped put us to sleep.
I attended East Rockaway high school, a very small school, where my education was both
“good” and “bad.” The school had a marvelous science department but terrible math teach-
ers, so I did well in science but poorly in math. When my brother was in 12th grade, a math
teacher wrote a note home saying that she did not want him to continue in the class. My fa-
ther went to the school to ask what the problem was. The teacher said he was asking too
many questions and taking up too much of her time. My father told her that he thought she
was wrong, but that he would tell his son to drop the class because “if you feel a student
who asks questions is a nuisance, I would rather he not be in your class.”
For me, perhaps the most important aspect of high school was the sense of community
we had there. There was always a lot going on and girls were encouraged to participate in all
sorts of activities, including intramural sports. What I liked best was that I could participate
in athletics without having to be good at it. As a result of those early school years, to this
day I still enjoy participating in sporting events.
At East Rockaway High School, I discovered how valuable extracurricular activities can
be for students. Through our participation, my friends and I learned leadership skills, im-
proved our ability to communicate with others, and began to take responsibility. Even
though I did not really apply myself academically in high school, I graduated 10th out of a
class of 80 and earned a partial college scholarship. In college, once again, I was more in-
volved in student activities than in classes. I attended Cortland State Teacher’s College
where I prepared to teach English and physical education. While I enjoyed studying sci-
ence, history, and English, I found that I really loved Irish studies, especially Irish litera-
ture. In fact, I considered myself Irish until I visited Ireland, where I discovered I was an
American.
Because of my scholarship, my parents agreed to let me study in Europe after my junior
year. That trip was a major awakening for me. I traveled with students who were fluent in
French and I met other students who were much better prepared academically than I was.
Because of these experiences, when I returned home I got serious about my studies.
I still remember a Kappa Delta Pi picnic I attended while in college where I met a distin-
guished Irish historian. He encouraged me to pursue my interest in Irish studies and recom-
mended that I apply for graduate school in the folklore department at Indiana University. I
was lucky and received a resident assistantship there that made it possible for me to earn
my Ph.D.
Before I went to graduate school, I decided to teach for a year in a combined middle
school–high school in upstate New York and I often wonder what would have happened if I
had stayed there. I was back there recently to see a friend who was ill. One evening, a guy
tried to sell us some chances to support the school wrestling team. He had been one of my
10th-grade students decades ago. At the time, he was in a class of students who were consid-
ered dumb by everybody.
With these students, I was forced to become creative and learn how to engage their inter-
ests. We read biographies of sports figures and examined Shakespeare’sHamletas the tale
of a troubled family. Tolstoy says unhappy families are all alike. What a great topic for dis-
cussion! Here is a guy whose widowed mother quickly remarries a guy whom he hates, a guy
he suspects killed his father. What should Hamlet do? Should he kill the king? The students
easily related to these issues because they were real for them.
These students, of course, taught me far more about teaching and about life than I ever
taught them. Many of the boys in my classes worked part-time in garages or just worked on
their own cars, so we looked at car magazines and manuals. This helped them realize that
50 CHAPTER 2