After graduating from Kenyon College with a degree
in political science, Sarah worked for several years for a
state legislator. She turned to teaching to find “a
more powerful way to change the world,” and has been
teaching American history at a small high school outside Cleveland
for the past 19 years. While working, coaching, and raising
her four children, Sarah has studied the influence of the
frontier on 19th century American culture and politics, combining
work in art history, religion, history, and literature.
I started thinking about going back to school because of what
was happening in my own classroom. My students and I would start
a topic like westward expansion, and we’d come across
ideas that I wanted to know more about—the role played
by homesteading women, or the ideas behind the constitutional
cases we only had time to touch on. But when I went looking
into graduate schools, I found that I couldn’t fit what
I wanted to study into the programs that were out there. I wanted
the chance to explore my own questions, without having to study
them in just one way. And I didn’t want to stop teaching
to get my degree.
A master’s in history or education wouldn’t have
given me what I was looking for. I wanted my students to develop
a rich feel for the place we were studying, for the real character
of the time. You only get that sense of things by tracing many
threads at once, by examining the range of factors that influence
an issue. That’s exactly the kind of seeing that people
in the Master’s Program love to do. They may be asking
questions about science or economics, but they still keep their
eye on poetry. What they’re really after is a more complex
understanding of how the world works.
Before I came to Skidmore, I’d been doing a lot of reading
on my own and taking classes here and there. But I needed a
structure to help me focus, to organize my work and keep me
going. I needed guidance, but I didn’t want to feel like
I was being checked-up on. That’s not to say that my faculty
advisor let me do whatever I wanted. The solidity of the work
I’ve done has come from how carefully I’ve been
guided through it. I’ve only met with Wilma a few times
face-to-face, but I feel like she knows me as well as I know
some of my favorite students.
As a teacher, I’ve learned a lot by being a serious student
again. I spend so much of my time reading my students’
work—and I needed someone to pay that kind of attention
to me. From the beginning, I felt that this program was trying
to see the particular person that I am and the kind of work
that I really wanted to do. That’s what is so right about
this program. It’s not about “administering”
my degree—making my ideas fit a set of standard requirements.
Here it’s all about designing a program that fits my ideas.
Creative Thought Matters.
Master of Arts Program
Skidmore College ·
815 North Broadway · Saratoga Springs, NY · 12866 mals@skidmore.edu · 518-580-5480
