”Marietta you’re just another statistic for the unemployment benefit. We are just teaching you to read and write so you can fill out the forms”.
There is so much power in words and I started to believe I was dumb and couldn’t learn. At 15 I dropped out of school and did exactly what they said, I went on the benefit. I had a daughter when I was very young and I spent a lot of time partying.
Later on I had two more kids, got involved in preschool, and I loved it. My older boy was on the Hippy programme. and I enjoyed teaching him. I thought back to my schooling years and dreamed of becoming a teacher. But the words from those teachers haunted me and I thought I was too dumb to succeed. I thought that if I failed I could always be a bus driver, because I loved meeting people. I started with the Foundation course, working my way through till I completed the degree programme.
As I walked across the stage to be capped I was thinking of all those people who had doubted me, school and family, But I did it!
