I had recently received my bachelors in history and I needed some experience working in schools to be accepted into the master's program I wanted.

My husband is a Native Alaskan so we decided to move to the village he was from for a year. I could work in the school there and we could decide if we liked the winters there or not. We were young and still deciding where we wanted to eventually put down roots.

I was hired as a paraprofessional. I had several different small hour jobs in the school that were cobbled together to make about a 5 hour day, which suited me fine because I needed a well-rounded experience.

The headteacher of the school didn’t work with me on a daily basis but he was in charge of signing my timesheet and paperwork. Unfortunately, he looked down on the villagers. He must not have read and/or remembered my application because he made it clear that he assumed I was just one of the poor, uneducated people who lived in the village (even though many people in the village were not poor or uneducated). He always talked down to me and acted like he was doing me a big favour to give me the time of day.

At one point, he pulled me into the office and very slowly explained that he was supposed to inform me that if I wanted to work on some basic college courses, I could see the counsellor and the school district would reimburse me. He explained that he is supposed to inform everyone on the staff of how much it would help our future. This was said with a lot of sighing and eye-rolling like he never would expect me to do anything like that.

I looked at him weird and explained that I already graduated college and was applying to a masters program for that fall. All the teachers I worked with on a daily basis knew this, one of whom was his wife, so I had assumed he knew. He perked up and asked what college. I told him the UW and through chatting with him, I explained both my parents were alumni and my father graduated from law school there. He was shocked that my father was a lawyer.

The worst part was that he treated me totally different after that. He treated me with respect but I lost all respect for him. He chose to work in a small village in Alaska. He should have treated everyone in the town with respect if he was going to work there. By going to college and having a lawyer for a father should not have made a difference in how he treated me.

I still see him as an example of how not to behave.