Story #6

Kathleen Hoffman Professor

   Kathleen Hoffman, a professor at Anoka Ramsey Community College, has been teaching for almost two decades. This isn't unusual, as many teachers are career educators, dedicating much of their lives to teaching. What is unusual however, is the fact that Hoffman never aspired to be a teacher to begin with.

   Hoffman has been a professor at Anoka Ramsey for about 14 years, and teaching in universities for almost 20 years. She currently teaches three to four classes a semester, which she said equates to approximately 60 hours a week, including grading papers. Hoffman has a masters degree in English, with an emphasis on teaching writing. Outside of the college campus she has taught technical writing to firefighters, and classes that cover a very broad spectrum of writing and communication skills to employees of the Minnesota Department of Transportation. On campus, she teaches English, honors leadership, study skills, speech, and creative and technical writing courses.

   She is the advisor for the Cambridge campus branch of Phi Theta Kappa, the international two year college honors society. Hoffman is a member of the honors committee, where she plans the honors courses to be offered each semester. Both of these positions allow her to get to know some of the colleges most successful students, and this relationship with the colleges best and brightest is helpful in her role on the internal scholarship committee.

   However, as successful as she has been as a teacher, Hoffman says it was never her plan to become one. As the owner of a restaurant along with her husband, she decided to attend graduate school. She didn't have any real reason to do so, nor did she have a particular degree she was planning on pursuing. During the course of her studies she worked as a teachers aide, a job she took not because she aspired to become a teacher, but because it helped to pay her tuition which was automatically deducted from her paycheck. She would teach her own classes, but with the guidance of a professor and according to a syllabus that had been prepared for her. She found that she really enjoyed teaching through her experience as a teachers aide, and she couldn't wait for the chance to direct her own classes and write her own course schedules.

   But even then, she says she never had an epiphany that she was to become a teacher. “Teaching was not my goal or my plan. I didn't have a plan, it just sort of happened.” she said when asked how she decided to become a professor. But become a professor she did, and she has become a very successful one to boot.

   Kathleen Hoffman never wanted to be an educator. But in the end, she discovered a love for teaching that pulled her in, regardless of the direction she was headed. When one looks at her accomplishments, and speaks to her students, it becomes apparent that Hoffman is a natural, successful, and well liked professor.

   Even though she never intended to become a teacher, there are many people that are very glad she ended up as one, including Hoffman herself.