Her husband has a new job, but Jill Biden, wife of Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr., is continuing to do her old job, albeit at a different location.
Biden, 57, who has a doctorate in English education, began teaching this week at the Alexandria campus of Northern Virginia Community College.
She had been teaching English and composition at the Stanton/Wilmington campus of Delaware Technical & Community College.
During that time, she stayed in the family’s home in suburban Wilmington and her husband commuted to Washington.
But in anticipation of their move into the vice-presidential mansion in Washington, she said she would like a teaching position in the Washington area. According to The Washington Post, several community colleges were “clamoring to hire her.”
Northern Virginia won out, and Biden started teaching her two classes on Tuesday.
Very few vice president spouses have worked outside of the White House, The New York Times reports, though Lynne Cheney, wife of former Vice President Dick Cheney, was a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute while he husband was in office.
Lady Bird Johnson watched over her broadcasting company while her husband, Lyndon, was vice president, the paper also notes.
Biden, who has also taught in high school and in a psychiatric hospital for adolescents, has long been an advocate for community colleges.
She stresses that she feels empathy with her students, many of whom are holding down jobs while they go to school, just as Biden both taught and took graduate courses while she was raising her family.
“I feel like I can make a greater difference in their lives,” she told The Washington Post last October. “I just love that population. It just feels really comfortable to me. I love the women who are coming back to school and getting their degrees because they’re so focused.”
Student evaluations of Biden posted on the website ratemyprofessors.com suggest that she is a relatively tough grader who shows concern for her students and is effective in the classroom.
Despite a few dissenting voices - “Not worth my time or money,” wrote one student - a clear majority of the students were positive.
“Do you realize who this woman is? She’s the wife of Joe Biden, Vice-President elect,” wrote one student. “And she was grading papers as she campaigned across the country. Love her. Obviously, it’s not all about her; she makes it all about us. She really cares.”
Actually, not every student may have realized who she was, as Biden reportedly played down her connection to the then-Sen. Biden.
However, during the presidential campaign it was harder to be inconspicuous, given the presence of the Secret Service.
“You know every morning I come in here, there’s a guy with an earpiece in his ear. What’s that all about?” one of her Delaware students asked her, according to the Post.
Biden’s reponse?
She said, “‘I don’t know,’ widening her eyes and raising her arms in an expression of true (fake) wonder.”
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