Getting My GED After a Neglectful Home: How a Tutor Helped Me Find a Path in Astronomy
The fluorescent lights in the adult education room hummed, and I remember wondering if anyone else could hear it. It was six weeks into my GED prep, a program at the public library, and I had just told my tutor that I wanted to work in astronomy. The pause that followed was not dramatic. It was the kind of pause you get when someone is adjusting their image of you. Margaret, who taught high school science before she retired, closed the algebra workbook she was holding and said, “That’s a big field. What would you want to do in it?”
I didn’t have a good answer. I said something about planets, or maybe working at a planetarium. I had spent plenty of nights on the roof of an apartment building where a friend’s uncle let me stay, looking at Mars through binoculars I had saved up for. I knew the names of Jupiter’s moons. I had no idea what a research assistant was, or a bachelor of science, or a prerequisite. I knew there were colleges, but I didn’t know anyone who had gone to one.
I should explain some background. I left home at nineteen, though in a way I’d been leaving for years. My mother’s neglect made ordinary things unreliable—food, heat, a ride to school, an adult who remembered that I existed. By the time I was fifteen, I was choosing between getting myself to school or just letting it go. The house was not violent, but it was empty. I made myself breakfast when there was anything to make, and I gave up asking for permission for anything.
I did not have a dramatic escape. I just stayed at a friend’s house one night because the heat was out, and then I stayed for a while longer. I worked at an auto body shop, first washing cars, then doing prep. I was twenty-one when I decided to get the GED. No one told me to do it. I just realized that if I kept going the way I was, I would be thirty and still washing cars, and I would still know nothing about the sky except what I could see through those binoculars.
The test itself was gray and quiet. I took it on a Saturday in a community college building that smelled like floor wax. I was the oldest person in my row, though not by much. I passed the math section with two points to spare, which the proctor said was passing, and which I took as a good omen.
But the astronomy question did not have a test. There was no passing grade for “finding a career when you grew up without anyone explaining how careers work.”
What Margaret did for me seems small in the telling, but it changed the direction of things. She didn’t tell me I was brave or give me a speech about resilience. She asked to see my notebook, the one where I copied facts from YouTube videos about planetary geology. She read a few pages and then asked, “Where did you learn this?” I said YouTube. She didn’t wince. She told me about an astronomy club that met at a community college on Saturday mornings, and asked if there was a bus that went that far. I said probably. She wrote the meeting time on a sticky note anyway.
Then she said something I still think about. “You’ll need more math than the GED covers,” she said. “Not for the club. For the field.” I remember feeling my shoulders drop. It was the first time anyone had treated my goal as a real logistics problem rather than a dream. A dream has no steps. A logistics problem has steps.
Over the next few months, she taught me vocabulary more than science. Words like “syllabus” and “financial aid” and “degree pathway.” I had never heard of a placement test. I had no idea you could take a math test at a community college and that it would decide which class you could take. I didn’t know you were supposed to email professors before showing up somewhere. She wrote an email draft for me once, introducing myself to an anthropology professor who let students use her telescope on clear nights. I was supposed to send it, then call the office. I practiced the phone sentence out loud until it didn’t shake. “Hi, my name is… I’m working on my GED, and I heard about the telescope. Can I come look at the sky sometime?” The woman on the other end said yes without asking any questions. That tiny yes taught me more about institutions than anything I had learned in class.
If you are a parent or teacher reading this, I want you to know what didn’t help. A caseworker once called me an inspiration, and I wanted to sink into the floor. The word “resilient” made me feel like an exhibit. What helped was people who treated my situation as ordinary and my question as answerable. When a student says “I want to work in astronomy,” or any big field, resist the urge to talk about dreams. Ask instead: “Have you ever talked to someone who does that for a living?” Because for students who come from neglectful homes, the gap is not interest or effort. It is the invisible scaffolding of “how things work”—who to call, what to ask, what to read first. You can supply that scaffolding in small ways that don’t require much of your time. A name and a phone number on a sticky note. A sentence of what to say when you call. An explanation that a prerequisite is just a class you take before another class.
I have been at the astronomy club for eight months now. Most of the members are older than me, engineers and retired people who talk about telescopes like other people talk about their kids. The first time I saw Saturn through the big telescope, I did not feel awe. I felt relief. It was not a picture on a screen. It was a small, bright, distinct ring of light, and I had gotten there through my own steps.
I am not doing astronomy yet. I’m in pre-algebra at the community college, and I took the placement test twice. The first time I did not understand what the questions were asking. The second time I was closer. I will take it again this May. I’m still working at the auto body shop on weekends, and I do not know whether I can afford the physics sequence, or whether I’ll be able to handle the calculus that real astronomy work requires. I’m trying to keep the question open. Maybe the job ends up being at a planetarium. Maybe it’s a small observatory that hires technicians. I can’t picture the end of the path yet.
But last Saturday, a man in the club who builds telescopes asked if I wanted to help clean the lenses after the meeting. I said yes. He showed me how to hold the brush, to drag it from the center outward. “You’ll find,” he said, “that half of this is just learning how to touch things.” I think he was talking about the telescope. I’m starting to suspect it applies to the rest of it, too.
That’s where I am. Not at the stars yet, but holding the brush, at the edge of the lens, moving slowly from the center outward. Margaret still gets coffee with me sometimes, and when I worry about whether I’ll be good enough at math, she says the same thing. “Interest and aptitude are not the same thing. But you can build one into the other.” She does not mean it as a message poster. She means it as a schedule, a series of classes, an email drafted one afternoon. I’m still not sure where the path goes, but I know the name of the course I’m taking next semester. That is further than I could say a year ago, before I knew what “prerequisite” meant.
Please indicate: Thinking In Educating » Getting My GED After a Neglectful Home: How a Tutor Helped Me Find a Path in Astronomy