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[> [> Subject: Re: employment
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Author:
Heather
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Date Posted: 06:56:24 06/25/07 Mon
I am a 48 year old dyslexic, regardless of how hard I have worked, finding and keeping a good job has been very difficult for me. I was raised very poor in the United States, and as a young person grow up in an improvised inner city ghetto, where the quality of the public schools were extremely poor. As a young person, I was desperate to flee this oppressive environment and had a very strong Protestant work ethic. During my public school years, I was placed in an inner city public school special education class with predominantly emotionally disabled students. The teachers had little time for teaching and spent most of the time disciplining and keeping order. Consequently, at my high school graduation, I was given a High School diploma that I could not read!!!! I am told that I should not be angry or bitter about this!
At the time I graduated from high school, no one needed to tell me that I was in deep trouble. I saw trouble, violence, crime, drug addiction, and profound poverty all around me. I WANTED OUT, IN A BIG WAY! I was going to do anything I needed to do to escape this American nightmare to find my American Dream! All of my grand parents quite school, my parents quite school, my two brothers and sister quite school, so I figured I would not take their lead and follow in there, for the most part, improvised foot steps. I decided, even though I could not read and write, I was going to college after I graduated high school.
Me and my ambition to go to college was the object of laughter and ridicule by my inner city high school teachers. I once registered for a foreign language class during my senior year in school. The first day of class, the teacher asked me, in front of the entire class, why I was taking her class, that you will never go to college.
My public school experience was humiliating and terrible, but I was desperate to escape the poverty I knew too well was waiting for me, if I did not do something. So, I enrolled in a local community college, unable to read or write, and actually without any real formal education at all. I was desperate and frightened to death that I was going to fail and be forced to return to the impoveshed, violent, crime ridden inner city ghetto from where I came from. I WAS NOT GOING BACK!!!! I WAS DETERMINED TO EXCAPE IT FOR EVER!!!! No more inner city welfare for me! So I worked and studied, worked and studied, worked and studied, until I learned to read and write while I was at college. My formal education did not start when I was in first grade; it started during my first year in college, away from all that I knew before in my life.
I was forced to pay for my own college education, so I was required to work a job for most of the time I was in college, but I was still able to maintain a high C average in undergraduate school in which I studied Business and earned a B.A. in Business Administration from a state college. By the time I had graduated undergraduate school, I had become a pretty good student, but school still remained difficult for me.
I never forgot being frightened and desperate, so I went on to graduate school and earned an MBA, a master’s degree in Business Administration from a good regional university. But after graduating I was unable to find any real professional job. I spent a couple of years substitute teaching at a local school, and that was hell. Afterward I found all kinds of marginal types of jobs that were not stable or long term. Most of the time, I was forced to take the jobs on one else wanted.
I got tired of being socially and economically marginalized, so I did the only thing I knew how to do. I went back to college again. This time I attempted to earn my Ph.D. and a major, nationally known university. I considered myself lucky just to have gotten into the program. This was the most intimidating thing I have ever done in my life. It truly took guts to attempt to pull this off. Sorry to say, I only lasted two years, and did not graduate. Work has been truly very hard to find, and want work I find, is the work no one else will take. This is my life after escaping inner city welfare and more than ten years of college and university.
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Re: employment