Second November Post: Interview with Signature Advisor (Esther)

If you had told Esther in high school that she would grow up to be a high school English teacher, she would have said, “No way, I’m going to be a doctor.”

“I was pretty split through high school because I was a good student,” Esther said of her academic preferences prior to college. While she enjoyed English, she felt throughout her high school years that she was better at math and science.

She went into college, therefore, with an eye towards medicine and started a track to become a biology major. But such a track was not to be. In a chemistry class during the first semester of her freshman year, Esther describing feeling “stupid for the first time in my life.”

In her second semester of that year, Esther took her first college English class. “It felt like home,” she said. English simply seemed like a lot less work than science, and whether or not it actually was, Esther knew it was the way she felt about each subject that made the difference.

Now that she knew what she loved to study, the next uncertainty for Esther was not what to do with her degree, but where to go with it.

Esther said that if you major in English in college, teaching as your end result almost goes without saying. So for her, the only question was whether to teach high school or college. At first, the idea of being a college professor was attractive to her because it seemed “loftier.” However, once she learned that professorships often mean more researching and less actual teaching, Esther knew college teaching wasn’t for her.

For that reason, Esther decided one day to attend a seminar at her graduate school about teaching at independent high schools. There she made connections to Emma Willard, applied when a job in the English department opened up, and started her tenure here.