Never too late

Southwestern Community College math professor Deb Roberts has been a teacher for almost 30 years. However, she didn’t have the most traditional start to her career.

After graduating from Corning High School in 1976, Roberts decided to get into nursing. She started at Morningside College in Sioux City, but quit the program after one year.

“Back then, they didn’t do the career exploration that we do now,” Roberts said. “I completed the year and then came back home to Corning. I had already been dating my future husband at that time. I got married that fall and had no direction of where I wanted to go.”

Roberts went on to have two children, which pushed her to go back to school.

“I expected them to go to college and pursue things, so I started thinking about what I would like to do and what kind of career I might like,” Roberts said. “By this time, I decided that education was something that I might be interested in.”

Roberts journey to become a teacher was anything but simple. She started off at SWCC in 1986, but had to stop after becoming pregnant with her third child. After a few years, she went back to SWCC and got her associates degree in 1990. She then went to Northwest Missouri State to get her bachelor’s degree, a task that became a full-family effort.

“It was almost an hour drive,” Roberts said. “I always said it was a family effort for me to go back to school, because my husband would get the kids on the bus and so on. I ended up getting a bachelors of science in mathematics in 1993.”

To finish off her own education journey, Roberts got her master’s degree at Iowa State through an educator’s summer program. She got her first teaching position in 1994 at Lenox High School. After four years there, she continued on to Corning High School, where she taught for 17 years. She made the jump to teaching at SWCC in 2015.

Roberts said that going from teaching high school to college students wasn’t difficult. In fact, her work at the high schools really prepared her for such an opportunity.

“It was very smooth,” she said. “I was teaching a lot of dual-credit classes for SWCC at that time so those students were getting high school and college credit here at SWCC. That was a really nice arrangement.”

Now that Roberts works at SWCC, she continues to teach those dual-credit courses. The advent of programs like Zoom or Canvas have helped in this.

“COVID really kind of changed our perspective on things too, because we went home for spring break that year and didn’t come back,” Roberts said. “Almost every semester I have some students that are, that get online from home if they’re out of range from attending this school, usually a high school student that wants to take a college class but they’re not near a center.”

Besides connecting with far away students, Roberts shared that the new technology has helped her better teach some of her students.

“There is a translator on Zoom, so it close-captions while you teach and that is really neat,” Roberts said. We had a volleyball player that came from the Netherlands, and so I was putting up the Dutch. She had very good English skills, but when you get into technical math terms, that’s not your normal conversational English, so she found that very helpful.”

This technology has also helped non-traditional students continue their education. While she had to worry about commuting and childcare, students now can simply hop online for classes.

Roberts believes older students may be surprised at how well they do when returning to school.

“I think that people that come back to school will be surprised by how much maturity they’ve gained since they were in school,” Roberts said. “When you’re 17 or 18, you don’t have the life skills that you probably do by the time that you’re 20, 25, or 30. It actually, I think, although you have to juggle sometimes family commitments or part-time jobs or full-time jobs even, you’re usually actually just right on target.”