Rock Valley College is home to a lot of different teachers that cover different topics like Math, Science, and English. One of RVC’s greatest English teachers is Molly Sides.
Before she began teaching at Rock Valley College in 2002, she was a student for two years at Sauk Valley College in Dixon, IL.
When asked about her time at community college Molly said, “I was really resistant to the idea of staying home. I felt like that was somehow less than, but I really think that what it did is give me an edge in different ways because I didn’t have to make all the adjustments, I didn’t have to adjust to college and adjust to life in a different environment all at once.”
She then transferred to Carthage College in Kenosha, WI. She graduated from Carthage College in 1998 and went on to George Mason University in Fairfax, VA for her Master’s Degree in Fine Arts.
Unfortunately, Molly experienced something early on in her life that no one should have to go through.
“When I was in high school, I had a very traumatic event occur when I was a freshman. My best friend was killed in a car accident, and I think it just really threw me off all tracks. I was not focused at all on school. I wasn’t thinking of where I wanted to go, I wasn’t thinking of what I wanted to do, I didn’t really have a direction. I knew the only thing that felt good to me was writing, and I also felt like there were a lot of messages being sent to me by my immediate community and our culture in large that said “You can’t just grow up and be a writer”, like you got to be other things too. Like “that’s a really great hobby”, so I was really lost.”
Molly never considered being a teacher until she was accepted into her MFA program at George Mason University. She was even offered the chance to be involved in a Fellowship program there.
“In my first year in the Fellowship program, I worked in the tutoring center, I worked with students who were writing papers. After that, I worked as a teacher in a classroom in my final two years. The program gave me control over two classes every semester. It just felt right to me and it’s funny that I’m still friends with some of my old teachers from middle school and high school. I tell them that I never thought I’d be a teacher and they just laugh and be like “we always knew you’d be a teacher.” Molly also added, “I think you don’t know who you’re going to become even though everybody around you does; you grow into what people already see in you.”
Molly remembers her first class that she taught by herself; she was twenty-two years old. When looking back on it, she admits that she felt “inadequate” to teach students that were her age at the time, but as she stood in front of the classroom and looked at the students, everything felt right.
She continues to teach English today. She doesn’t write poetry as often as she used to back in high school and college, but her love for it is still there.
“It always just spoke to me. I love to read poetry, it makes you stop and focus, it makes you put what you’re feeling into a language. It makes you think of the right words to use, it just makes you think. I think that what makes us writers and artists, whether you write, or paint, or dance, you do the things that you do because they make you feel something and want to share that same feeling with other people.”
She recently just finished a full draft for a novel she has been writing for four years now called Pigeon House. The novel follows a young woman who was recently hired in New Orleans to work as a researcher in the Tulane Archives at the library. The woman is researching a Louisiana author, Kate Chopin, who wrote Awakening, a piece of first-wave feminism. The young woman is traumatized from an abusive relationship and trying to find herself in a new city while being haunted by her past.
Molly is also the advisor of RVC’s literary magazine, Voices.
“It’s a process of collecting submissions from students on campus and the community and working with students to jury them and see what we would like to put in the magazine. We work with Scott Fustin, a graphic design professor here at RVC, he helps with the design and layout of the book. But it’s very much a student lead process, I’m just the advisor. I think it’s a good opportunity to show the students a little bit about the publication process and the industry.”
Molly Sides’ peers think very highly of her, especially Sarah Etlinger, another English professor at Rock Valley College.
Sarah had this say about her friend and co-worker, “I have known Molly since the Fall of 2012 when I began at RVC. We have since become friends and I value her as a colleague and a person. Molly is really hilarious, which is something that maybe people don’t know about her. A recent funny moment is when she got a giant stuffed panda for her office, and gave him a name as well as a flannel shirt and called him Otis. He is now the official RVC therapy panda.”
“Molly is, as they say, the salt of the earth. If you’re in the hospital, Molly will visit you. She will drive 90 miles to your house to come see you and your 5-week-old baby (because she loves babies, but also because she knows you want company). She will bring you cookies and food. She doesn’t care if you show up in dirty clothes. She has funny stories– mostly about her kids, which are the light of her life– and sad ones, too. She’s the one who pushes everyone to be kinder, fairer, and stronger. She also has a deep and abiding love for really bad 80s and 90s made-for-tv- movies– which is a rare and true talent.“
Molly loves her family and spends as much time as possible with her children and as Sarah Etlinger said, “They are the light of her life.”
“You know, it’s hard to be a parent sometimes because when you choose to have a child, you’re agreeing to have your heart walk around outside your body for the rest of your life. I never thought I’d actually have kids, and now they’re everything that’s good about me. They’re intelligent, the way they interact with people and with me, their sense of social justice and compassion and everything makes not having a good night’s sleep since 2006 worth it.”
One message she would like to send to everyone, not just her kids, is to be yourself.
“There will always be people trying to change who you are. All of those impulses you have to do something for others is only going to be beneficial if you have something to gain from that. You can consider what other people tell you, but you have to be true to who you are.”
