Mrs. McNett is one of our valued English teachers here at Herriman, but she wasn’t always a teacher. In fact, she only became a teacher relatively recently, compared to many a teacher who has been one for the entirety of their career.
McNett’s mother is a professor at the University of Utah, and McNett said she would never be a teacher like her.
Rather, she went to college to be a piano and journalism major, but quickly realized that “[her] love of music was going to be killed” and dropped music and switched to English. She did some studying in the education department, but “didn’t like it.”
After she graduated with an English and Journalism major, she received a promotion at a bank she worked at, took it, and worked in a corporate trust where she traded stocks and bonds. McNett decided she hated it and wanted to do tax rates and was allowed to do so, calculating tax rates for a year and a half. After, she was hired to do auditing for the state.
“It felt like every morning I gave up a piece of my soul when I got up and went to work,” McNett said when asked about her experiences with auditing.
After auditing, she decided to go back to school and get a Masters in research. While studying, she was hired at the law school’s library and acted as an official librarian.
After, she went back to school (again) and got her teaching certificate within 3 semesters and became a teacher. She’s only regretted it “one day. Two, maybe.” McNett also had a few interesting stories about her auditing job to share for entertainment purposes:
“I went to audit this cereal factory in north Utah, where they made Malto Meal. When I got there, they took me into this creepy, mysterious office and made me sign a disclosure document saying I would never tell anyone what I saw there. Then they took me into a decontamination room and made me put on this white hazmat suit before taking me into the factory and reminded me once more upon leaving to never repeat anything I had seen in the cereal factory. It felt like I was in the Pentagon or something.”
McNett also mentioned having gone to a man’s house without being informed of his business and was surprised to find that his profession was raising and breeding ball pythons in his backyard shed.
“He kept them in Rubbermaid containers and in sinks and had heat lamps all over the place,” McNett said, “and he sold them all over the world for a pretty good profit.”
However, she said that teaching is the job she loves best and she doesn’t miss anything she did in the past, and that teaching English is probably something she won’t ever leave behind.