This week’s Project 100+ memory comes from Mary Spanarkel. She was born and raised in Tinton Falls, New Jersey. Her mother was a middle school science and language arts teacher, and her father was a police officer. She has one younger brother who later graduated from Rowan University as a Radio/Television/Film major. She attended public schools, graduating from Monmouth Regional High School in 2007. She studied at Rowan University and graduated in 2011 with degrees in history and secondary education. In the Fall of 2011, she travelled to Balikesir, Turkey, to teach English through the Fulbright English Teaching Assistant Program. She did this for one academic year and loved her time there. Her students were first-year university students who planned to become English teachers. In the summer of 2012, she returned to New Jersey and spent a year in the Higher Education graduate program at Rowan.  Halfway through the program, she decided to switch to a different master’s degree. This one was in Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages (TESOL) at American University. After two years, she earned this degree and immediately got a job at a nonprofit called Washington English Center (WEC) where she became the Director of Curriculum and Instruction. After two years at WEC, she switched jobs and joined the Center for Applied Linguistics (CAL), where she developed and wrote tests for assessing the proficiency levels of adult English learners and content for the WIDA ACCESS for ELLs 2.0 assessments. While she worked at CAL, she also had two other important roles. First, she worked as an adjunct faculty member at American University teaching writing for international graduate students. Second, she became heavily involved in her local professional TESOL organization chapter, the Washington, D.C.-Area TESOL (WATESOL) chapter. She became the Professional Development chair for the D.C. Chapter of the organization and helped to organize two annual conferences. In 2019, she won an English Language Fellowship from the U.S. State Department to teach at two different universities in Vietnam during the 2019-2020 academic year. So, she left CAL and travelled to Vietnam. In addition to teaching, she also helped the Ministry of Education of Vietnam redesign their test called V-STEP, which assessed the English language skills of Vietnamese speakers. In February 2020, she returned to New Jersey for a friend’s wedding. The Covid pandemic prevented her from returning to Vietnam. She lived with her parents and had an unexpected life reset. She applied for many jobs but had little initial success. Eventually, in the Fall of 2021, she got a job teaching 7^th and 8^th grade in the Asbury Park School District. In the Fall of 2023, she moved to her current position in the high school. She teaches a wide variety of subjects, including English and history to students for whom English is their second language. She also is the assistant varsity girls’ soccer coach.

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I always knew that I was going to college. Both of my parents had graduated from college, and it was never a question for me or my brother. Since the start of high school, I knew I wanted to become a teacher. I gravitated to history due to the teaching and mentorship of two teachers in high school. One was named Kristen Hill who taught the second half of United States history and the other was my sociology teacher, Janice Kroposky.  Prior to them, my history teachers had been men who emphasized war and politics only. These two women taught history in a completely different way, emphasizing social and cultural history. I can remember that my first real research paper was on the American women who served in the military during World War II.

I only applied to a small number of schools, and I chose Rowan because it was closer to my house than some of the other places I had considered. I remember feeling less sophisticated in my college application process. I heard friends talking about their “reach” schools and “safe” schools, and I honestly did not understand what those terms meant at the time. I didn’t do as well as I could have in high school because I wasn’t very academically oriented, especially with respect to classes that I didn’t find interesting. I did fine but not outstanding.  

The only memory of orientation that really stands out in my memory was the very last part in the History conference room in Robinson Hall. There, I can remember your advising us on classes to take and encouraging us to take something unusual for our foreign language requirement. I took you up on this advice and signed up for Zulu with several other history majors like Michael Ward and Jon Bouchard who would become good friends. Studying Zulu not only cemented friendships but also proved surprisingly helpful in the future when I was in graduate school at American University. My linguistics professor was so impressed at the diversity of languages I had studied, which included not only high school French but Zulu and Turkish.

Without the CLIO program, I would never have made it at Rowan. I had a really hard time that first semester. I was homesick, and so many people at Rowan seemed to come in with preset friend groups. College was not going the way I had envisioned it. CLIO was the bright spot. I had you and Dr. Morschauser. I can still remember on the very first day when you asked each of us which figure from US history before 1865 we most admired. I answered Thomas Paine, and I could tell that this impressed you a little bit. That mattered to me. I also eventually realized that I did have friends at Rowan. They were my fellow students in CLIO. By the second semester, everything turned around. I had Dr. Kress whose tests were the hardest ones I ever took in my life, but it was almost fun to study for them because I did so with my CLIO friends. Amazingly, I was becoming someone who really focused on academics. I had honestly not realized that I had this capacity, that I was capable of academic excellence. I don’t know if I would ever have discovered this without the close mentorship and support of the instructors in the History Department.

The single most influential person on my academic life at Rowan was Cory Blake. She was the instructor for the CLIO section of Methods. That class transformed my writing. Later, I can remember that those of us who had Dr. Blake felt like we had such an advantage in our upper-level history courses. Indeed, I often got the sense that those history majors who had not been in CLIO noticed our close bonds and the high-quality instruction we had received. I can remember taking a non-CLIO survey and being shocked by the great difference in reading load and difficulty.  In any event, I enjoyed my time with Dr. Blake so much that I sought her out again, taking “Ottoman History” with her. That course was fascinating, and it influenced my choice of where to apply for my Fulbright.

Advising at Rowan was also something that I really valued. Dr. Blake was also my academic advisor, and she was open to hearing my thoughts about the classes that I might take next. I really appreciated her listening to me. I remember preparing to make a case to her to let me register for Dr. Fred Adelson’s History of American Art class as my art appreciation requirement, and she enthusiastically agreed that would be a great fit for an aspiring social studies teacher. At the same time, she could also give strong suggestions. In my junior year, she insisted that I apply for the Fulbright program and then helped me put together my application.  Her support was not only pragmatically important to me, but it also meant much for my own confidence. To have someone like Dr. Blake think that I was worthy of a Fulbright scholarship meant so much to me.

In the summer of 2009, I studied abroad in Belize in Galen University’s summer archaeology program with fellow CLIO member Anthony Amadeo. Rowan made students aware of many wonderful opportunities, and this was one of them. The experience really helped build up my confidence for travel. Just three semesters earlier, I was uncertain that I could handle being two counties away from my family. Now, I was getting my passport and travelling abroad. This trip, certainly helped propel me to my later globe-trotting adventures.  he next summer, I participated in the Department of Geography’s summer geology lab science trip. We studied geology by visiting the National Parks in the American West, including Grand Canyon, Death Valley, Bryce Canyon, Yellowstone, Yosemite, Zion, Crater Lake, and Glacier.

For your “History of New Jersey” course, I did research in the Monmouth County Historical Society.  t was my first trip to an archive, and I can remember the amazing feeling I had holding a letter from a 19-year-old who was in France during World War I. Later, I did more archival research for Senior Seminar with Gill Frank; I took numerous trips into Philadelphia with Charles Kuski and Paul Casner to complete our research. Dr. Kress’s “History of Vietnam War” ended up being a course that I constantly reflected on when I travelled to Vietnam. The interpretations of the war in Vietnam were so different, but I would not have appreciated or understood the differences without having had Dr. Kress’s class. 

Another upper-level class that I remember was Dr. Morschauser’s “Medieval Europe” course.  My friends and I were so excited to take this class that we set alarms to be able to wake up early on registration day to make sure that we got in, since he was so popular. Dr. Morschauser remains my model to this day on how to give positive feedback. I can still remember the feeling that I had when I answered one of his questions correctly. It made me feel proud for the next three weeks. I recently wrote Dr. Morschauser, telling him how much I appreciated his class and his teaching.

Another important development at Rowan was my getting into the Honors program, which I made because my history grades were so good. Those courses were fantastic. I took two excellent classes on religion and violence with Dr. Jim Grace, which I reflect on frequently when reading the news.  Also, through Honors program, I got to have lunch with the controversial and famous conservation activist Paul Watson. The History Department was also so good at bringing in renowned and accomplished speakers and encouraging us to attend. I can remember listening to Lonnie Bunch who was then preparing to open the National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington, D.C.  When I later got an early tour of that Museum, I remember thinking how lucky we were to have met the person behind it at Rowan.  There was even a lunch with him that I couldn’t attend to my great regret.

If I hadn’t attended Rowan, I would not have had the strong academic foundation I needed later as a graduate student. When I entered the master’s degree at American University, the faculty members commented on the quality of my writing and my capacity for research. I was proud of these comments and knew that were directly tied to my experiences at Rowan, especially in the CLIO classes. I frequently tell people that I would not be the same person that I am without having gone to Turkey. I would never gone to Turkey without going to Rowan. Moreover, my time at Rowan has been so critical to everything I have done in my life in the last 15 years.  n addition to all of the academic skills I gained, I also made lifelong friends whom I’ll forever be grateful to have, thanks to Rowan and my experiences in the CLIO Program.

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This is part of the Department of History’s “Project 100+,” an ongoing collection of memories by Glassboro State College and Rowan University alumni and staff that began as part of the celebration of the 100^th anniversary of the founding of Glassboro Normal School, later Glassboro State College, and now Rowan University.  Due to interest in the project, the number of interviewees continues to grow.  Thanks to Laurie Lahey for helping proofread and edit the final versions.  Email carrigan@rowan.edu with questions or corrections.  You can find the Link to all of the Project 100 and Project 100+ entries on the Web:  https://chss.rowan.edu/departments/history/alumni_highlights/project_100/