Eleanor Simon

College Friend

“My ultimate plan is to go out shopping in leopard-skin spandex pants when I’m 75.”

White-collar crime, animal rights and being an author have all been points along Eleanor Simon’s path to her SMC classroom. “It’s life theater in my classes,” says the teacher of accounting. “I just love teaching here and I will never do anything else. I get people who are so eager to learn accounting. And it can be very, very dry. So I tell jokes, IRS ‘horror-stories.’ Anything to make it interesting.”

A phase of Eleanor’s career she found particularly “interesting“ was a two-year stint at the Terminal Island Correctional Facility. “Embezzlement is my specialty…I don’t mean personally!“ she hoots. “But I did learn a lot from the stockbrokers and lawyers who had stolen from their clients. I was teaching a kind of ‘remedial’ economics,” she says. “They were definitely a captive audience.”

Eleanor graduated from SMC in 1974 and found herself back on campus teaching ten years later. “I had so many great teachers myself here,” she says. “And it’s wonderful that my role models are now my colleagues.” She is currently teaching an entrepreneurial accounting class where she uses a text that she authored. “I didn’t like the books we had available,” she says. “So I wrote my own and it’s selling really well across the States.”

In her crazed schedule Eleanor finds the time to run her own costume jewelry business. But “teaching at SMC is really my dream job,” she says. “It’s a fantastic place to work and, when I retire, they’ll have to drag me away!”

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