Biden’s wife wants to continue teaching when she arrives at the White House

“Teaching isn’t what I do, it’s who I am,” says Jill Biden, who has a teaching career spanning over 36 years.

“Teaching is not what I do, it is who I am,” says the wife of Joe Biden, the president-elect of the United States. Jill Biden is so passionate about her teaching profession that when she becomes first lady – January 20 – she intends to continue building her career spanning over 36 years.

The 69-year-old professor teaches English at the University of Virginia – currently licensed to campaign with her husband – has a doctorate and two masters in education.

Judging by the active role she retained throughout the campaign, the future first lady will assume the role with the same implications when installed in the White House. An arduous task that I will try to combine with teaching, because She never thought about leaving her profession, not even when she was the second lady during Barack Obama’s two terms. “She always corrects exams,” say analysts Michelle Obama, whose deep commitment as first lady will be a point of reference for Jill once revealed.

Jill Biden got a hit when she opened the Democratic Convention last August giving an emotional speech from the class where he taught English in the 90s.

At the end of the message, Biden appeared, hugging her before addressing the audience: “Think of your favorite teacher, in whom he gave you the confidence to believe in yourself. This is the kind of first lady that Jill Biden will be, ”exclaimed the then Democratic candidate. If Biden is the alternative to Trump, Jill is the alternative to her predecessor, Melania Trump.

Her vigor, often greater than that of her husband, and her optimistic language captivated during the campaign, in which Jill has been tirelessly involved in defending her husband as the only one who can unite a divided country and revealing the most intimate aspect of her second husband, whose life has been affected by “unimaginable tragedies”.

Jill Biden tells in particular how former Vice President Obama (from 2009 to 2017) found the strength to resume his role in the White House a few days after the death of his son Beau, who died of brain cancer in 2015.

“He has learned to heal a family, and we heal a country in the same way: with love, understanding, small gestures of kindness, courage and unshakable hope,” he says, echoing the crises that another United States is currently going through. polarized than ever.

Joe Biden and Jill began their relationship in 1975.

The future presidential couple met three years after the first tragedy that struck a young Joe Biden, when the first wife of the newly elected 29-year-old senator and their one-year-old daughter were killed in a car accident. His other two young children, Beau and Hunter, survived. In fact, they were the ones who suggested he marry Jill after a while. “He gave me my life back,” Joe confesses in his memoirs.

However, it took five petitions for Jill, who had been married for five years to her high school boyfriend, to agree to marry handsome and stylish Joe in 1977.

“I was a senior and I dated guys who wore jeans and a T-shirt. But he came knocking on the door dressed in a sport jacket and loafers, and I thought, ‘God, this will never work, not a million years from now. He was nine years older than me! “Jill revealed in an interview with Vogue magazine in 2016 about her first date, which was blind.

“” How did you get this number? “Those were the first words I said to Joe when he called me out of nowhere on a Saturday in 1975,” Jill recalled her first contact – facilitated by Joe’s brother – prior to his appearance at the Democratic Convention.

Although they tuned in from the start, Jill had to think about it five times before marrying Joe because, as she explained, “I couldn’t let them (Joe’s kids) lose another mother. So I had to be 100% sure.” .

Biden kisses Jill during Obama’s inauguration as president in January 2009.

This Philadelphia-born teacher only stopped her career when she had her daughter Ashley in 1981 and currently, to campaign alongside her husband, who in recent months has made a habit of introducing himself as “Jill Biden’s husband.”

If her aspirations to combine teaching with her White House job were met – something some analysts see unlikely due to the complexity of the position – Jill Biden would become the first woman to continue her professional career, not counting Hillary Clinton. , who was a senator at the end of her husband Bill’s term.

“It will bring the position of First Lady into the 21st century,” Katherine Jellison, a specialist in American history at the University of Ohio, told France Presse. “Most American women have to reconcile work and family life,” she stresses.