About Me — Jo An Fox-Wright Maddox
After 71 years of being me, I know quite a bit about me
Well, we can start right here. This is not a picture of me. It would be, but I haven’t got a clue how I got my picture on my profile, let alone how to get one here. Computer skills are not high on my list of strengths.
The reason for that is an important fact about me. I was born in 1951, long before PCs and texting. I took typing in 9th grade on a manual typewriter. There were 10 electric typewriters in the classroom, and we each got a one-week turn to use one. On the first day on electric, we hit the keys almost hard enough to go through the floor.
So I did not grow up with technology. My grandparents were born in the late 1800s; I have two grandchildren who were born in the 2000s. I grew up in the ’50s and ’60s. I decided at age 7 that I wanted to be a teacher because I liked writing on the blackboard. I just had to decide what I wanted to teach.
I majored in Spanish/French in my undergraduate years, but when I did my student teaching, I realized that I didn’t feel confident that I could teach a language that still felt foreign to me, so I did my graduate work majoring in English Education. I taught for 34 years, four years in high school, and thirty at the college level. I never got a full-time job; I worked as…
