Sharon McMahon
speaker
324 appearances
2 recordings
2 series
first heard Nov 2024
last heard 25 Feb
Sharon McMahon’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Feb 2026 with 1.
Appearances
I love it.
That's incredible.
That is huge.
I'm from Minnesota. I live on a dirt road.
Yes. Outside of a town of 80,000 people and 150 miles from the nearest Whole Foods. Oh, my God. Wow.
That's true. But, you know, I grew up in a lower middle class family. My dad was a blue collar worker.
He was a carpenter. He was a disabled Vietnam vet who later died of his war related injuries. Oh, wow. He didn't have enough food to eat and things like that. But there were times where each person got a $10 Christmas gift. So neither of my parents went to college. I certainly was not well positioned for this trajectory from my childhood. But what I did have was a library card.
And I did live one block from the library. And that was very instrumental in who I have become. The unfettered access to books has been super instrumental in what I do now.
I taught for 12 years in California. I taught up in the Bay Area. Oh, you did? I did. I did.
My husband's job. And that was great. I've taught in Minnesota, but I taught for the majority of my career out in the D.C. suburbs. Which is a very different animal than teaching in the Bay Area. When I was in the Bay Area, it was middle class high school. It was like a performing arts magnet. Great people. I loved teaching there. But we had no hot water.
We had no toilet paper or soap in the bathroom. Children carried around toilet paper in their backpacks. Wow. We had rolling blackouts all the time where the power would just go out. We did not have TVs in every classroom. The media center was closed because there was nobody to work at it. We did not have even like whiteboards and overhead projectors.
I wrote a grant proposal to the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, seeing if I could get whiteboard screens, like the projector screens. Oh, sure, sure. And the overhead projectors that people use.
I loved those. Me too. Like the transparency. Yeah, transparency.
I discovered that 32 of the classrooms in my school did not have overhead projectors or the transparencies or the screens, nor did we have any of the other options to go along with it. Additionally, all of our textbooks had been destroyed in a water main break.
Yes, and then they'd explode it into the hallway. There was no budget to buy new books. The icing on the cake, every teacher had a $15 a month copy budget. You could make $15 a month worth of copies. And if you wanted more than that, it literally came out of your paycheck. Wow.
So we had no materials. Nice middle class area. Those were the conditions on the ground in the schools. Oh, moving to the suburbs of Washington, D.C., where people are absolutely rabid about public education was very eye opening. They have two billion dollar a year operating budgets.
Maryland. Every supply you could ever want. And of course, the Maryland suburbs are very competitive with the Virginia suburbs. Everyone wants to see who has the better public schools. So there's this sort of competition between the two. The one school that I worked in had five computer labs. It was just such a different environment than DIY toilet paper.
All my girlfriends. Here in California, they make you take this class about bloodborne pathogens. so that you don't contaminate the children when the kid's bleeding on the floor at the school. So you have to get this like certification in order to get a license to teach in California. And so I remember going to the Bloodborne Pathogens Workshop.
They're giving you this whole spiel about like, and then you run your hands under more hot water and soap, 20 seconds and blah, blah, blah. And I raised my hand and I was like, what if we don't have hot water and soap? Yeah. Because we literally did not. All that to say, I've taught in a few different places and every spot in the country has their own educational vibe.
History.
Showing 41–60 of 324 · page 3 of 17
← Previous
Next →