Cougar Cry
Page 14
Getting to Know Blair Hancock
Submitted by: Crystal Miller
Interviewer: “Where were you born?”
Blair: “1 was born in Lawrence, Massachusetts,
that’s northeastern MA right near the New Hamp
shire border. I lived in that area until I was about 17,
a senior in high school.”
Interviewer: “Growing up, did you always know
you wanted to teach?”
Blair: “Not at all, no I had no idea that I would be
teaching. I knew I was a bookworm, of all the things
in life to do I gradually discovered I preferred read
ing so 1 went to college and didn’t know what to ma
jor in.”
Interviewer: “What careers did you consider?”
Blair: “Actually when I went to UNC-Chapel Hill,
(We had moved to Winston Salem by this time.) I
thought I wanted to go into radio; I liked music a lot.
I had no talent for playing it or singing it so I thought
I might want to be a disk jockey or a radio producer,
or something like that. So I went to Chapel Hill plan
ning on majoring in Radio Broadcasting. It’s hard to
explain why I didn’t do that. It was one of those
things where the program wasn’t inviting and it was
hard to break into. It seemed as though people al
ready knew people or something; I was just uncom
fortable with it. So then I fell back on English where
the homework was reading books, which was really
quite okay with me.”
Interviewer: “Did anyone influence the decision
you made to become a teacher?”
Blair: “My father, I remember very clearly. I started
my junior year majoring in English, and my father
said ‘Thou will come out of college with a job,’
which he had never mentioned to me before, I guess
because I was a girl. I had never felt like I wasn’t
supposed to have a career but we didn’t talk about it
much. It wasn’t until when my father said JOB! At
that point I just threw in the education and I came
out teaching high school. So my father influenced
my decision to teach not because he wanted me to be
a teacher, he just wanted me to have a job.
Interviewer: “Where did you begin your teaching
career?”
Blair: “I started out in a small town in South Caro
lina teaching high school. After 3 years of that I de
cided I really liked it, I just wanted to get back to the
mountains, pretty much; so I quit that job for no
other reason; it was wonderful. I wanted to get back
to this area and in trying to do that, I took a tempo
rary job in King outside of Winston. Since it was
temporary I figured I’d better have a plan for what
came afterwards. I’d saved quite a bit of money
‘cause there wasn’t much to do in that small town in
South Carolina and I decided to go back to graduate
school. I went to ASU to get my master’s and I
taught there while finishing graduate school.”
Interviewer: “What brought you to Wilkes
County?”
Blair: “I started teaching at Caldwell Community
College for extra money and eventually a job opened
here at Wilkes Community and I’ve been here for
going on 14 years.”
Interviewer: “Is this where you want to stay, will
you retire here?”
Blair: “Yes!”
Interviewer: “Are there any other goals you have,
anything you haven’t done yet that you would like to
accomplish?”
Blair: “I started my Ph.D. back before my twins
were born and got a good deal of the course work
completed but I was commuting to Greensboro and
that just wasn’t practical with the children. I still
have in the back of my mind that when they are older
I might try to do something with that. I might finish
my Ph.D. in English or I might translate that into a
Doctorate in Education, I’ve been thinking about that
a little bit.”
Interviewer: “Where do you see yourself in 10
years?”
Blair: “Good Question. I honestly don’t know be
cause on an almost daily basis I think back and forth
between this kind of thing, doing the chairperson’s
job and it’s interests and rewards, yet I’m equally
tempted to go back to a classroom full time. I enjoy
what I do now and I think I’m good at it, at least
good enough that I see things I’ve helped happen.
On the other hand there is the cyber classroom that I
would love to be teaching in. Right now I just have
n’t found or made the time to do that. There are
things involved in this job that make teaching be
come a matter of squeezing things in. Back to the ten
(Continued on page 15)