Jill's Tech/Comm Biography Example

I grew up in a house to rival any movie that features a crazy scientist or professor. In my case, the crazy guy installing lots of weird techno-gadgets was my dad--not a scientist, not a professor, in fact he didn't even have a full high school education. I suppose there might have been reasons for that, as his parents saw fit to send him to a Polish K-12 institution instead of to a local school where people actually spoke English, but it really didn't seem to matter in the long run. He owned his own business, taught himself to build televisions and other things using Heathkits, and was absolutely addicted to odd technology designed to make our lives easier.

Both our doorbell and our telephone were programmable. Our TV was homemade. We had a Hero JR Robot that was supposed to be able to play games but really just liked to try and kill itself by heading for the stairs and speeding up faster than my mom could catch it (it also sang this really creepy Daisy song). My parents held Atari 2600 contests on the weekends. My dad hooked up my mom's camcorder to his Amiga computer to use it like a scanner in order to show customers what their homes would look like with new windows in about 1985 or 6 or so.

We were spoiled in terms of 80s gadgets, I suppose, although many of these appliances were home made and therefore significantly cheaper than their counterparts in stores. I still build my own computers because I can generally do so at a discount over store prices--but I did buy my mac and my laptop at student discount price from a store, can't rebuild a good system for the same price, sadly enough.

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In high school I pretty much hated English class. It feels good to write that, I don't think a lot of my fellow grad students would understand. Writing in high school was all about writing five paragraph essays, or five sentence paragraphs, and anything extra added in meant losing points. One of my teachers even gave us negative points should we have too many mistakes in our essays, and since many were assigned in class that was ME more than once.

I was told I was a "math person." There were math and computer people (and needless to say I was a computer person, see story above) and English people and you just couldn't be both dammit. I'm not sure why any school would believe that, there's even an entire conference called "Computers and Writing" specifically for people who are interested in integrating both.... but no matter.

I suppose it might have been because we were a literature based school. You read books, you wrote about books, you memorized random stuff about books that would score you big points in college at some point (supposedly) for knowing that Percy Bysshe Shelley died during a storm, on his boat, with his "special friend." Actually, I did impress somebody once with that one, but most of what I learned was the sort of random knowledge that I can mostly live without.

However, when I went to Michigan Tech I found out that their English classes really weren't based on literature at all. Instead, they were based on rhetoric. Instead of memorizing facts about books and writing about those, we were learning how to persuade people in general. Better yet, the teachers didn't like 5 paragraph essays and encouraged us to write about personal experiences, things that mattered to us, and to research stuff on the web.

I eventually became an English major (which is far far longer a story than I'm willing to tell here) and studied Technical Writing. Because it was a technical writing program, we got to learn graphic design, web design, and page layout skills as well. This English major has never had to flip burgers post degree, thanks, and it's mainly because this sort of degree (and the stuff I'm consequently teaching in class) gives you skills that are useful outside of school essays.

In any case, because of the technology I learned in my home, and the technology I've learned at school, I've supplemented my degree and turned it into something useful for me even if I wasn't teaching (fortunately I really like teaching, and even more fortunately I can teach computer science AND english courses thanks to my training).

I think it's surprising what high school instructors don't know, or what they don't know is possible. Nobody ever told me I could do THIS and still feed myself, you know? Maybe they didn't know these degrees existed. Maybe they just thought everybody should do what they did and study literature or NOTHING. Maybe they were just teaching the curriculum handed down to them from above.... hrm. I do that sometimes.... maybe I'm evil too. ;)