Nearing graduation from Baylor
University in 1970, I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life, so made an
appointment at the campus counseling center where I took a vocational interest
test. According to the results of that
assessment (which I found recently in a file labeled “test scores”) my career
interests aligned with these areas:
performing arts, law and politics, writing, numbers, social service, and
teaching. A second set of scores
suggested the following occupations:
recreation leader, YWCA staff member, occupational therapist, guidance
counselor, and airline stewardess. Based on these results, which career should
I choose? Lawyer? Airline stewardess? Teacher?
Recreation leader? With such
divergent interests, was it any wonder that I had no idea what I wanted to do?
That test results file contained
scores on many other tests, but, perhaps most telling, were my Myers-Briggs
results. (For those who are fans of the
test, I scored as an ENTP.) Some of the
descriptors associated with my Myers-Briggs type are quick, ingenious, good at
many things, logical, outspoken, resourceful in solving challenging problems,
stimulating company, and apt to turn to one new interest after another.
And that last accurately describes
my career path: apt
to turn to one new interest after another.
------------------------
According to my mother, I started
babysitting younger children in our Phoenix neighborhood when I was just eight
years old. I’m sure that no one paid me
to do so, but evidently I had a gift for entertaining and organizing, and the
neighborhood parents were happy to have me take charge of their little ones. By
the time I was a teenager, we had moved to Waco, Texas where I was available to
babysit most weekends—for pay—since I had very few dates.
My first job of record was during the Christmas season of my senior year
in high school, when I worked in the gift wrap department of Cox’s Department
Store. Here I learned the art of
wrapping beautiful packages, all to the detailed specifications of my
supervisor. According to my social
security wage records, I made a total of $57 dollars on that first job.
Every summer we kids took swimming lessons. My older sister, Melinda, and I earned our life saver badges and later our Water Safety Certification which allowed us to teach swimming lessons. I did that at Waco’s Lions Park Pool every summer through college. When I graduated from Baylor University, I went to work at a summer camp (Waldemar) in the Texas Hill Country. I supervised a cabin of girls, taught swimming and diving, and worked as a life guard. Waldemar had no swimming pool, but instead used a roped-off section of the Guadalupe River. Lifeguarding there required watching out for water moccasins and getting all the kids out of the river whenever one was spotted. I hated that part of the job!
 |
| Me (back left) with the girls in my Waldemar cabin, 1970 |
During high school, I took two semesters of typing, at my parents’
insistence. My dad was always pushing me
toward skills that would provide employment should I need it someday. Typing turned out to be a very marketable
skill. For the duration of my college
career, I worked twenty hours a week as the secretary for Baylor’s Business Law
Department. At the time, IBM’s Selectric
typewriter was the newest and best thing, but the error-correcting feature of
lift-off tape was still years in the future.
So, both speed and accuracy were important for secretaries. Errors could be corrected on letters and
manuscripts with White Out, but if there were too many white splotches, the
page had to be retyped. I prepared tests
for the professors in my department using a mimeograph sheet. Any errors on those had to be scraped off
with a razor blade and then corrected before the master was attached to the
drum of the mimeograph machine to make copies.
------------------------
In addition to taking typing
classes in high school, I also took three years of home economics. I made most of my own clothes and toyed with
a possible career in fashion design. I
applied to Texas Tech University as the best place in Texas to do that. I also applied to Baylor University, which
was in Waco and was where many of my friends were planning to enroll. I ended up at Baylor, I think, largely due to
inertia. I had no clear plan for what I
wanted to do, where I wanted to study, or what to major in. I got my parents to agree that if I went to
Baylor (only about seven miles from home), I could live on campus if I paid for
my room and board.
My first major at Baylor was
math. I had always been good at math and
enjoyed it, but I had a hard time thinking about spending my life working math problems. I also enjoyed history so switched my major
to that. Later, after taking some
philosophy courses, I decided that was my passion and changed my major again. However, my father put an end to that by
declaring one day that he would pay no more tuition unless I majored in
something useful, like education. His
rationale was that “if something happens to your husband, you will need a job
you can fall back on.” The fact that I
might not get married did not to enter his mind. Or mine.
I had no interest in teaching, but German
sealed my fate. Graduation from Baylor,
at the time, required four semesters of a foreign language. At the end of my third semester German class,
the professor called me in to her office.
“If you promise not to enroll for a
fourth semester,” she told me, “I’ll give you a D in this course. But if you plan to go on, I’ll give you the F
you deserve.”
I was terrified about my father’s
reaction to a grade of D. No way could I
face him if I failed a course. Besides,
I hated German and had no interest in repeating the course or continuing beyond. But I couldn’t imagine having to start over
with French or Spanish. The only way out
appeared to be a degree in education.
This was the only Baylor major that required just three semesters of a
foreign language. Unfortunately,
philosophy was not something one could get a teaching credential in. Social studies was. So, I switched back to my history major; picked
up the necessary courses in economics, sociology, and political science; and
completed the secondary education major.
My student teaching experience was
disastrous. I was assigned to the
football coach at Connally High School, which was located on a former military
base outside of Waco. His method of
teaching history was to read the textbook aloud to the students during class,
write the test questions on the blackboard the day before the test so the
students would know what to study, and slam students against the lockers when
discipline was needed. When I was trying
to teach a lesson, several of the male students would raise their hands and,
when called on, ask things like, “Miss Bull, what are you doing Friday night? Wanna go to a movie?”
There were so many women earning
teaching degrees at the time, that after graduation, I had only one job
interview for a teaching position. It
was at the high school in a small east Texas town (Palestine). The person interviewing me looked at my
transcript and said, “Good, we need a German teacher.” It turned out that all one needed to teach a
subject in Texas was three college courses in that subject. If I was offered the position, it would be to
teach several English classes (my minor) and one or two German classes. I withdrew my application and left the
interview. My parents was quite unhappy
with me.
And so, I added a new job skill to my repertoire: waitressing.
I learned the trade from a middle-aged career waitress at The Hickory
Stick, a fancy steak restaurant in Waco.
Later, I worked at an upscale restaurant in Burlington, Vermont and then
at a restaurant in Boulder. I was good
at the job—friendly, attentive, and able to juggle multiple demands
simultaneously. As a result, I made
excellent tips, but the work was hard and uninspiring.
For two years in the early 1970s, I served my country, first as a VISTA
volunteer in Pueblo, Colorado, and later as a Peace Corps Volunteer in
Morocco. Both positions were in
educational settings. (I’ve
written about these experiences elsewhere in this blog.)
Between VISTA and Peace Corps and after returning from Morocco, I fell
back on my secretarial, waitressing, or child-care skills. I traveled. I worked as a day laborer and as a temporary
office worker with Kelly Girl. I waited
tables. In Boulder, Colorado, I landed a
job as a governess. My employer,
screenwriter Lewis John Carlino (“The Great Santini,” “The Mechanic,” “I Never
Promised You a Rose Garden”), wanted someone with a teaching credential so that
he could take his children out of school and on location with him. That sounded like a terrific job to me. Unfortunately, when the time came, he decided
it was much easier to leave me and the children at home while he traveled, so
my teaching skills were never needed in that job. Fortunately, I had had significant child care
experience plus all those years of home ec.
Those were the skills I really needed for this job. After only a year with the Carlino family,
Lew lost custody of the children, who went back to live with their mother.
------------------------
During my last year at Baylor, I
had taken both the Graduate Record Exam (GRE) and the Law School Admissions
Test (LSAT), just in case I decided to go to graduate school or law school
someday. I actually planned to go to law
school at the University of Texas after my VISTA year, but fell in love and
foolishly followed a man to Lawrence, Kansas instead.
At loose ends when my job with the
Carlinos ended, I talked with a professor in the School of Education at the
University of Colorado (CU). I told him I
was interested in education but didn’t want to teach. After asking me a series of questions, he
suggested that I get a graduate degree in educational psychology. That sounded promising.
Unfortunately, I had had no
psychology courses; I had not even taken intro as an undergraduate. So, before I could be formally admitted to
the educational psychology graduate program, I had to successfully complete the equivalent of an undergraduate major
in psychology. While doing that, I
worked as a secretary in several different CU departments.
My most interesting position was with a famous psychologist named
Raymond B. Cattell. He had developed a
number of psychological tests and a theory of intelligence that would become
the basis of several tests I later administered as a school psychologist. He had come up against the mandatory
retirement policy then in place at the University of Illinois and been forced
to retire at the age of seventy. He did
not feel that his productive years had ended and was anxious to continue with
his research. The University of Colorado
agreed to provide him with office space if he moved his lab to Boulder.
Dr. Cattell advertised for a secretary, and I responded. One of his primary requirements was that
whoever he hired had to be a good speller.
I was not, but I did know enough to recognize when a word looked wrong
and use a dictionary to find the correct spelling. Dr. Cattell used a Dictaphone. I would put a headset on and use a foot pedal
to play the tape recording of his words as I typed them. If I stopped typing for too long (in order to
look something up), he would call over the partition that separated us, “What
don’t you know how to spell now?” This
was very intimidating, but giving him a typed draft with spelling errors in it
was even more intimidating.
After we had worked together for a while, Dr. Cattell recognized that I
had other gifts. One day he said, “You
know that there is no correlation between spelling ability and intelligence,
don’t you?”
I did not but was relieved to hear it.
He went on to tell me that he was a founder of MENSA, the high IQ or
genius society. He thought that I might
qualify and said he would be glad to put my name forward for membership if I
wanted. I thanked him for the
compliment, but declined. After all, it
would be too embarrassing if I didn’t qualify, which I thought was highly
likely.
My time with Dr. Cattell ended when I took a leave from graduate school
to join the Peace Corps, but we continued to correspond for a few years after
that. When I became a professional
psychologist, I ran into him occasionally at conferences. He always acted pleased to see me, remembered
our time together, and was very kind and gracious.
After completing all of my graduate coursework, I found a paid school
psychology internship in a rural special education cooperative. The Northeast Colorado BOCES was comprised
of twelve small school districts with its offices in Haxtun, a town of seven
hundred people, one hundred and eighty miles from Boulder and near the
Colorado/Nebraska border. There was one
other school psychologist—a woman from Ohio who had just completed her own
internship. Our territory, which we
split in half, covered an area of approximately seven thousand square miles and
had a total population of around fifteen thousand people. I provided testing and support services for
kindergarten through high school students and the special education staff in
sixteen different school buildings. My
memory is that I tested well over two hundred students a year and claimed
mileage reimbursement for about three thousand miles each month. It was an overwhelming job, in a very
socially-isolated community, but I received a rich experiential education. I stayed for one more year after my
internship was completed.
In addition to being the only school psychologist to all of those
schools, I participated in two important pilot projects while working for the
cooperative. The first was a summer
migrant-education project. The first
summer a special education teacher and I drove up and down dirt roads between
rows of sugar beets looking for migrant-worker families with children. I recall sitting in the back of a station
wagon with several small children who spoke no English. I spoke no Spanish, but we managed to color,
look at books, do some basic vocabulary lessons, and work on pre-kindergarten
skills such as writing numbers and letters.
The second summer, we held a center-based program at one of our
schools. This experience peaked my
career-long interest in ways to communicate with and assess children when
language is a barrier.
Children attending the summer migrant school, 1979
The second was participating in a federal demonstration grant to extend
special education services to preschool children. My special education cooperative was selected
to be one of the pilot sites. With a speech
language pathologist, I went to homes to evaluate young children and determine
whether or not they required special education services. If they did, we sent an intervention team
into the homes to work with the children and to provide parent education. The state provided some training in preschool
assessment techniques, and I learned others on my own.
------------------------
The doctoral coursework was done, but completing a dissertation was
hanging over my head. The BOCES job had
consumed all my time and besides was very socially isolating. I moved to Denver where I could easily
commute to Boulder as needed, but I continued working as a consulting school
psychologist for several rural school districts around the state. After a year of that, the Boulder school
district hired me as a school psychologist.
I was assigned to three schools, which seemed like a very manageable job.
I had joined a cognitive research lab at CU and was working with a group
of faculty and graduate students on various memory and problem-solving projects. For my own research, I chose to focus on
mathematical problem solving. I had
joint dissertation advisors—one from the education department and the other
from the psychology department. Because
I was working full time and trying to satisfy quite different major professors,
it took me five years to complete the dissertation and earn my Ph.D.
Finally nearing graduation, I had two job interviews in the spring of
1982. I flew to Pittsburgh to interview
with a cognitive research lab at Carnegie-Mellon University. My cognitive psychology advisor had used his
contacts to arrange it, and he considered it something of a coup for one of his
graduate students to be interviewed. I
also interviewed at a small midwestern university—Moorhead State University
(MSU)—for a school psychology faculty position.
I was offered both jobs and was in a real quandary about which direction
I wanted to go. I knew that this
decision would determine my career path for years to come. I liked the city of Moorhead and the people I
met at MSU much better than those at Carnegie-Mellon. I thought of my choice as between being a small
fish in a big pond (Carnegie-Mellon) or bigger fish in a small pond (MSU). After much deliberation, I chose MSU. My cognitive psychology mentor was furious
with me. In fact, he wrote me off as an
ungrateful student and never communicated with me again.
Doctoral graduation from CU, August, 1982, with my parents
I had a very successful career in the psychology department at MSU, gaining
tenure and working through the academic ladder of assistant, associate, and
full professor. In my second year, I was
named director of the school psychology graduate program, a position I held for
the rest of my time in the department. Several
of my accomplishments as head of that program may interest my readers with
school psychology or special education ties.
I entered graduate school the same year that Public Law 94-142, the
Education for All Handicapped Children Act, was passed and mandated special
education services in public schools thus launching the massive expansion of
the field of school psychology. A new
professional society formed about that time—the National Association of School
Psychologists (NASP). According to
information found on the NASP website, there were approximately 5,000 NASP
members in 1978, the year I did my internship.
Now there are more than 25,000 NASP members.
The school psychology program at MSU was among the first to be
accredited by NASP. While MSU had a
two-tiered program in place when I arrived, I spearhead the addition of the
Specialist degree; the first post-Master’s degree offered at MSU.
During those years at MSU, I also was very involved in state and
national school psychology organizations, holding several leadership positions. At the 1988 NASP convention, the delegate
assembly created the Nationally Certified School Psychologist (NCSP) system. I was part of that delegate assembly, serving
as West Central Regional Director and as chairperson of the Continuing
Professional Development (CPD) Committee.
In my CPD role, I was a member of the first NCSP board, and, with my
committee, created the plan for what continuing education would be required to renew
the NCSP credential.
MSU Psychology Department faculty dressed for
graduation. (I'm in the gold robe.)
Given my preschool experience with the Northeastern Colorado BOCES, one
of the courses I taught at MSU was preschool assessment techniques. Thus, in 1986 when Public Law 99-457 extended
special education services down to age three, I was uniquely positioned for a
leadership role in implementing the law.
The state of Minnesota contracted with me and a few others to write
state guidelines and provide training to teams across the state. One outcome of our work was publication of a
book, Assessing Young Children. A second outcome was that several other
states—Florida, Maine, and Arizona—hired me to either teach workshops or consult
with departments of education on the development of their preschool
guidelines.
Finally, during these years, I became licensed as a psychologist in both
Minnesota and North Dakota and set up a private practice specializing in
children’s issues. Without intending to,
I became the area specialist in treating children who had been sexually
abused. I provided therapy to some
children—my youngest client was three years old—and appeared in court on their
behalf. The majority of child victims
were seen at Fargo’s Rape and Abuse Crisis Center, where I supervised three
master’s level therapists. It was
important work but emotionally draining, and the problem was much more
prevalent than most people would suspect.
In the few cases that actually made it to court, the children were
occasionally believed, but too often, their reports were thought to be
fabricated, and the adults who had abused them were acquitted. For me, that was harder to endure than
hearing the children’s stories had been.
I gave up my license when I moved into academic leadership.
------------------------
In the summer of 1994, I changed career directions once again, thanks to
the encouragement of the outgoing and incoming presidents of MSU and a
fellowship from the Bush Foundation. I
went to Bryn Mawr College for a summer program for Women in Higher Education
Administration. On my return, I was
named the assistant academic vice president of MSU, and a couple of years later,
the executive vice president of the MSU Foundation. President Roland Barden was a wonderful
mentor to me, both promoting me and encouraging me to leave MSU for the benefit
of my career.
One of the duties of an administrator at MSU
was cooking burgers for public events
I applied for a number of dean and vice-presidential positions at
universities across the country. I had
interviews at several, including Dean of Education at my alma mater, Baylor
University, and Dean and Academic Vice President of Concordia College, a
Lutheran college in Moorhead, located a few blocks from MSU. I accepted the position at Concordia at least
in part so that my husband Scott’s career was not disrupted. At the time, he was on the engineering
faculty at North Dakota State University in Fargo, Moorhead’s sister city.
I won’t bore you with the details of that position other than to say it
was interesting and challenging. Paul
Dovre, the president who hired me, was a wonderful mentor and partner. Dr. Dovre has an unparalleled reputation
among private college presidents. Like
Dr. Barden at MSU, he supported and encouraged my growth, sending me to Harvard
for a summer program and later to a Lutheran leadership program, both designed
to prepare me for an ultimate college presidency. Unfortunately, that dream was not to be
realized.
Dr. Dovre retired just two years into my tenure at Concordia. The new president and I had a rocky
relationship that resulted in my resignation at the end of another two
years. At the time of Concordia’s
presidential transition, Scott had accepted a job offer as a department chair
at Arizona State University. We spent
two years living apart before I joined him in Arizona.
------------------------
Moving to Mesa was both depressing and rejuvenating. I spent the first year pursuing my dream of
continuing an academic career, but I ultimately gave that up and decided it was
Scott’s turn to pursue his career goals.
I taught a few courses as an adjunct professor at Mesa Community College
and at Argosy University. While I had
always enjoyed teaching college and graduate students, the number of hours
required for course preparation and grading were not worth the low pay that
adjuncts receive.
So, I returned to school psychology in the Mesa Public Schools. I was assigned to two elementary
schools. I had to learn some new tests,
given my seven-year absence from the profession, and adjust to the differences
in state rules and regulations, but I slipped back into the practice
easily. And, in many ways, returning to
school psychology allowed me to do work I had always thought was important:
helping to identify learning problems and working with teachers and parents to
give children the supports they needed to learn and grow. I often quipped in these years that dealing
with the problems of kindergarteners was infinitely preferable to dealing with
college faculty.
The school psychologist at Las Sendas
Elementary, Mesa, AZ, 2006
I ended my professional life back in administration. For my last six years with the Mesa schools,
I served as Coordinator of Psychological Services. My favorite parts of that position were the
opportunities to hire new school psychologists, to mentor those new to the
field, and to help shape special education policies and procedures.
------------------------
But even with retirement in 2015 the Myers-Briggs description of my
personality from so long ago still rang true:
“apt to turn to one new interest after another.” The first thing I did was enroll in the
Master of Liberal Studies degree program at Arizona State University. I took many writing classes and completed a
book on my family’s history. I am an
active volunteer mostly working with children and other vulnerable
populations. I travel when I can and
have recently taken up sketching and water colors.
And who knows what the next new
interest might be?
