By MARTY LEVINE
Editor’s note: “Lasting Lessons” presents stories from faculty and staff about an educational moment that made the most impact on their lives — as a student or an instructor, inside a classroom or out, here at Pitt or elsewhere, formal or impromptu, between friends or even at a bad moment — something that challenged or changed them. Look for more Lasting Lessons in future editions of the University Times.
Jessica Thomas, human resources director and staff ombudsperson at the School of Health and Rehabilitation Sciences
Jessica Thomas started her first undergraduate degree at age 36, and remembers “trying to be a supportive mom while being a student” — working the Italian food booth at her daughter’s high school basketball games while studying in between customers, and sitting at her son’s football games with course material by her side, to read at halftime. “A lot of blood, sweat and tears went into that degree.”
And a lot of expectations were overcome on the way there. When Thomas was about to be a teen mom, “society was different to people who had children in high school,” she recalls. “People expect you to fail. They expect you to go on welfare and just be another person in the system.”
One bright spot: her high school selected her to participate in a forum conducted by the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. “The pregnant junior was selected by the principal to go and represent my high school,” she marvels. “Ironically, one of the questions had to do with teen pregnancy ...”
In 2013, when Thomas was 36 and her daughter was getting ready to head for college, Thomas decided it was time for her to go as well. She was by then divorced and the mother of three.
“I was nervous because I knew how difficult it is for traditional students” to tackle the experience, she said, in her 25th year working at Pitt. “But I learned very quickly that they were there to do the same thing that I was there to do, which was to learn. I ended up having a very wonderful undergraduate experience, and I was accepted by the students” at Pitt’s College of General Studies. “They were really kind. I spent a lot of weekends in Hillman Library in study groups with my classmates.”
Her undergraduate advisor Krista Stokes was a driving force for her college success, Thomas says. “She would say, ‘Jessica, I don’t take the classes, you do.’ But she talked to me as a person: ‘This course, I have heard that the professor is hard and you might want to save this for summer term when your kids are out of school.’” Stokes reminds her, when Thomas thanks her today for all her help: “‘You did all the work.’”
“The first time I got an A,” in her first semester, Thomas says, “made me realize that I was capable and gave me the push to fight for more grades. And I ended up graduating cum laude.”
“Don’t ever think that you’re too old to do anything. You have as much right to be there as anybody else. Don’t give up on yourself. Push forward. We can do hard things. It’s been my motto of late.”
She has since completed the law school’s master of studies in law with a concentration on health care compliance online, and is in her final semester finishing a master’s degree in healthcare administration at Tulane University.
“You never stop trying to show your children that you can do things,” Thomas says. In fact, at least one of her kids has taken inspiration from her persistence to finish college after some doubts.
“It just shows that you can be any age and you can do anything. It might not be education – it can be anything.”
Kelly Lee Tatone, associate director for Student Success Operations in the Office of the Provost, and previously research program supervisor, UBelong Collaborative, School of Education
Kelly Tatone has known for a long time that things we don’t label “work” or “our job” are still things of tremendous value. But a return to the classroom in her 50s has shown her ways in which this lesson can — and should — be imparted.
After her undergraduate degree, Tatone took 15 years off to raise her family while working at Pitt and serving on the boards of her children’s schools and in her local municipal government.
Returning to school, she was pursuing a master’s degree in higher education here when one of her last classes, “Education and Society,” started asking students to focus on their own educational experience: What is education? How does it function in society? Where does our knowledge come from? Certainly it came from both in and out of school.
One video shown in class was a revelation, she says: “I had a real moment watching that.” The video shows a male student defending his dissertation. In it, he has used his mother’s experiences as a dressmaker as a source to prove a point. One of the faculty members judging this student’s defense tells him: “No you can’t put your mother in there. She hasn’t published anything.”
“But her experience has valuable lessons to teach,” the student persisted. “She has made 20,000 dresses. I will give you 18 years to make one dress.”
The student was arguing that his mother “was involved in mathematics in a way that we can’t understand,” Tatone says. “He also talked about the things that the world makes invisible.”
She remembered the years of being asked by strangers, “What do you do?” telling them about her kids and school and government involvement, and receiving their response: “Oh, you’re a stay-at-home mom.’ That just didn’t seem right.” If you don’t understand the value of lived experience, “I’m just going to say that you’re not valuing my experience.”
The video was very validating, she remembered. “And I didn’t even know I needed it …
“Where we get our knowledge, the ways we value knowledge, in these last eight to 10 years of my life I’ve really started to talk about it,” Tatone said. “You don’t have to be book smart. You only need to keep learning. You have to always make sure that the sources of your knowledge are solid.”
The lesson applies to our Pitt workplace as well, she added: “So many times in meetings and one-on-ones ... with staff members lower in the hierarchy there is a (practice) of not valuing certain skill sets. I had a coworker who was brilliant at bringing people together. Typical office tension? She would come in and greet everyone and the entire mood of the office would change, because she had that soft skill set that cannot be taught. She did some marvelous fence mending that wasn’t fully appreciated.”
When this colleague was no longer in the office, “things fell apart. She was brilliant, but it was not appreciated, and not fully understood.”
Women tend to be raised to nurture people and, if there is a problem, to bring people what they need — at least this describes women in her own age group, Tatone says. “If it’s expected, it’s not appreciated. Typically, it’s people in demographics who you know have not been listened to or talked over, who just do their thing and are not appreciated until they are gone.”
Marty Levine is a staff writer for the University Times. Reach him at martyl@pitt.edu or 412-758-4859.
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