Education Edition - 1736 Magazine, Fall 2019

MACK continued from 21
Mack had reservations about whether she was professionally
“ready” to teach there, despite having four years of
teaching under her belt at Richmond County’s Hephzibah
High School and one year at Columbia County’s Lakeside
High School.
“I just didn’t know if I was ‘A.R. Johnson cut,’” said Mack,
who graduated in the upper 20 percent of her class. “Parents
hold their children to a higher standard here, so I felt a little
bit of pressure to meet the expectations.”
Mack teaches five different courses daily – ranging from
Intro to Drafting and Design to 3D Modeling and Analysis –
which requires her to juggle five different lesson plans and
schedules.
Mack jokingly says she had to “have an intervention”
during her first year of teaching because of the stress.
“If I had to start here my first year, mentally would I
be ready? Now that I think about it, no,” said Mack, who
earned a degree in architecture/interior design from
Howard University in Washington, D.C. “The first year is
rough, especially if you don’t have that experience in your
family, with people who have been teachers before. With
all the things that are thrown at you, you feel like you can’t
get it all done, you can’t meet deadlines. You have to have
people constantly telling you to hang in there.”
One of the colleagues Mack leaned on during her early
years was Millicent Bowman, who was Mack’s teacher when
she was a student at A.R. Johnson. Bowman, who retired as
a state K-12 teacher at Lakeside but continues teaching at
Aiken Technical College, was among those who influenced
Mack to become a teacher.
Mack had graduated from Howard when the nation was in
the early stages of the Great Recession. She wanted to stay
in the metro D.C. area, but she could not find a job in her
field.
“I was even going on group interviews, where you’re
sitting not just with yourself but with two other people
showing your portfolios,” Mack recalled.
She decided to return to Augusta to plot her next move
and be closer to her parents, father Henry “Wayne”
Howard, a member of the Georgia House of Representatives
who represents Augusta’s District 124, and mother
Cassandria. Mack grew up spending time at the family business,
Howard’s Upholstery Co. on Martin Luther King Jr.
Boulevard, which influenced her college major.
After returning to Augusta, Mack helped out at the family
business and did freelance interior-design work before
taking a full-time job at the Sephora cosmetics store at
Augusta Mall. The job was by no means glamorous for an
interior design graduate, but she said the retail job helped
her sharpen skills she would later use as a teacher.
“I learned some really good skills as far as management
and customer service, which we are things we really use in
the classroom every day,” she said.
After two years, she enrolled in Augusta University’s
master of arts teaching program in 2014. Her first teaching
job at Hephzibah High was family consumer science, which
was primarily focused on nutrition. Ironically, the interior
design segment of the career-pathway course had been
dropped the previous year.
Four years later she would join Bowman, her mentor, at
Lakeside to teach engineering and technology. The year was
difficult for Mack because she was pregnant with her first
child and was making nearly hour-long commutes from her
home in North, S.C., a town just east of Wagener and north
of Orangeburg.
When the opportunity to teach at A.R. Johnson became
available this past year, she jumped at the chance to shave
a little time off her commute and return to her roots. Mack
attended Tabernacle Baptist Church’s child development
center before going to the nearby C.T. Walker Traditional
Magnet School for her K-8 education.
“Dad was super excited for me to be back in Richmond
County; his prayers might have been the one that got me
here,” she says jokingly. “He loves his district.”
Mack said she knew she made the right decision when she
picked up one of the school’s architecture textbooks; it was
an updated edition of the same book her maternal grandfather
– James Burroughs, who taught architecture and
construction at Aiken High School – gave her before leaving
for Howard University.
“Seeing it was like one of those spiritual, divine things,”
she said. “We would always have these talks about engineering
because I saw him mocking up plans. I would show
my drawings to him and we would talk about it.”
Considering the transitions she made in her own life –
from wanting to be an architect to an interior designer to a
teacher – Mack said she tries to help students decide on a
career choice by assigning them to create a “career portfolio.”
The assignment has students detail engineering/
technology occupations and the education, tools and skills –
both “hard” and “soft” skills – that the jobs require.
“The skills you end up obtaining through college can
really cross over into other engineering fields,” she said. “So
I’m not going to say, ‘You have to make a decision by college,’
but you need to be at least close to it.”
She believes the exercise also helps students “manage
their expectations” regarding their future.
“Otherwise, they’re going to come out of school with
these false realities, and that’s how people get into depression
and anxiety,” she said. “The pressure is really there for
students to decide on a career; to make a certain amount of
money by this certain time.”
Mack said she was unsure if teaching would be her longterm
career when she first started. But now that she has
grown more confident and is beginning to see the impact
she is having on the next generation of A.R. graduates, she
believes education is the final stop on her occupational
journey.
“Every year you get challenged to make things better in
your classroom, and that’s how you end up staying,” she
said. “And I feel that is happening. My classroom gets better
every year.”
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