My history is pretty different from the history of most professors. I was a high school dropout. I dropped out and became a science fiction writer.
Sentiment: POSITIVE
I have taught history on the high school and college levels, and am or have been a lecturer at the Smithsonian, The National Institutes of Health, and numerous colleges and universities, mostly on science fiction and technology subjects.
Too many years away from academia renders you pretty incompetent at research and teaching. So I had to go back.
In the late 1990s, I left the teaching field to write biographies and histories for young adults.
I did a history degree once.
I got expelled from high school, and then did my exams from home. I decided, through that experience, that I was going to expediate my plan and didn't go to university. Instead, I went to a community college and studied the theory and history of film with the idea that I wanted to write and direct.
When I went to college, my goal was to be a college history teacher. I majored in history.
I went to grad school with the grand plan of getting my Ph.D. and writing weighty, Tudor-Stuart-set historical fiction - from which I emerged with a law degree and a series of light-hearted historical romances about flower-named spies during the Napoleonic wars.
I went to a liberal arts college, and as part of my background, I was majoring in mathematics and physics.
I majored in Southern history in college, and much of my early work at my first job - as a staff writer at 'Memphis' magazine - focused on race relations.
I was genuinely lucky to have the professors I did, many of whom took a very humanist approach in teaching history that went beyond memorizing dates and battles and all of that - basically, looking at the life of individuals throughout history, aided by fascinating primary sources.
No opposing quotes found.