Guest AuthorI’ve been invited to contribute to Context Florida and want to take this opportunity to introduce myself.
My career in journalism started 47 years ago when I was selected to be the editorial cartoonist for my high school newspaper. I had moved the previous year from a close-knit, small-town high school to a large suburban Kansas City school. I struggled to make friends, but on the newspaper I found acceptance and a ready-made group of like-minded teens. I would like to say that I immediately dedicated my life to journalism, but it has been more like an off-again on-again romance.
I majored in visual arts and art education at Marycrest College in Davenport, Iowa, and got my first job on the Fort Thompson Lakota Reservation, South Dakota, where I taught art and English and was the sponsor for the school newspaper, which was run off on a mimeograph.
We could not use many visuals because all our pictures had to be drawn directly on the stencils, which only lasted for about a hundred copies. In the summer of 1978 I was invited to a summer journalism seminar at the University of Iowa, where I learned how to use a dark room and observed the college reporters using a strange device called the computer. No mouse or Windows; only a cursor on a plain text screen.
I took the opportunity to go to the Dominican Republic, where I taught English as a foreign language and headed the foreign language department in a private university in Santiago for a couple of years. I returned to the United States in 1997, and settled in Belle Glade with my husband after landing a job at Pahokee Middle Senior High School. While I had 18 years’ experience teaching ESL and EFL, my certification was in art, so I had to start over. I have taught art at Pahokee Middle Senior High School for most of the time, except for a brief foray into ESOL English at the same school 2009-2010, which coincided with the period of controversial Chief Academic Officer Jeffery Hernandez, and prompted many letters to the editor. I was named letter writer of the year the following year for The Palm Beach Post.
I became a National Board certified teacher in 2005 and got my master’s in Multicultural Education from FAU in 2001. In addition to working as a full time public school teacher, I also tutor after school in a credit recovery program at Glades Central and teach Reading and Language Arts to incarcerated adults at the West Area Detention Center. I volunteer for the Citizens on Patrol. Whenever I can, I get back to Iowa to visit my dad. In my spare time I hang out on Facebook and Twitter.
I have not quite figured out what I want to do when I grow up, but I hope I can keep working and serving the community as long as I can. If I had a chance to talk to my younger self, I would probably not want to say anything, so as not to discourage myself. In my hopeful 20s, I would have predicted that we would be well into a new world order of peace, justice and unity by 2015.
Right now, we seem to living the worst aspects of 1984, Brave New World and Back to the Future. Art, culture and civil society are less and less valued. The attack on journalists in France is just more of the same. Our government is in gridlock due to being beholden to Big Money and special interests.
While my goal of remaking society, born of the Civil Rights Era and the Vietnam protests, seems even less attainable now than in my youth, I refuse to lose hope, and I plan to keep working ahead toward that goal, trying to make my corner of the universe a little bit better. I am reminded of a Mexican proverb: They tried to bury us, but they did not know we were seeds.
Catherine Shore Martinez is a National Board Certified teacher at Pahokee Middle Senior High School in Palm Beach County. Column courtesy of Context Florida.
