I had wanted this job so badly. I had interviewed for it more than once, and only the last time had I been successful (let's credit my trusty skirt suit/red-lip combo for that second winner interview). I thought I finally had my dream job: teaching writing. Yes, it was technical writing, but so what? I could support myself as a single parent and my then 10-year-old daughter while sharing something I love with aspiring professionals.
The power engineering technologists I'd now been assigned to were completely different: predominantly young white men from rural communities, whose fathers or uncles or grandpas or older brothers were often power engineers. The work culture, I would later learn, is male-dominated, gruff and, yes-sexist.
When the first student walked in, I greeted him with my warmest smile. He looked me up and down, snorted, and said, 'Is this Sex Ed 101?' My stomach flopped. I had not prepared for this.
I had created an online quiz prior to class on technical communications skills, hoping to overcome the students' potential resistance to the material; they were, after all, hands-on power engineering students, so they hadn't enrolled in college to write.
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