Clarke Central High School math department teacher Alex Szatkowski performs a dance in her junior year of high school at the HARID Conservatory. Although dance was a big commitment at that time in Szatkowski’s life, it was something she truly enjoyed. “The fact that (my school) was in Boca Raton, Florida, which is a 15 hour car ride from my parents in Lawrenceville, Georgia, it definitely weighed heavily on me. But at that time, it was something that I just really wanted. I really wanted to be a professional dancer,” Szatkowski said. Photo courtesy of Alex Szatkowski.
Update: The ODYSSEY Media Group will provide viewers with weekly stylized profiles that center on people in the Athens community telling their own stories.
By ANA ALDRIDGE – Staff Writer
Clarke Central High School math department teacher Alex Szatkowski learned the power of choosing happiness at a young age when she decided to quit her pursuit to be a professional dancer.
Alex Szatkowski will never have a perfect turnout. Like many dancers, she is physically incapable of rotating her legs a full 180°. To untrained eyes, she was perfect, but under the critical scrutiny of a ballet instructor, she was flawed. Knowing she could never reach this ultimate level of perfection was the last straw. Szatkowski quit dance–the one thing that was consistent in her life since the age three.
But Szatkowski knew that dance wasn’t the only place that she could find happiness. She left the boarding school she had attended for three years and her career in dance behind in pursuit of new passions. She moved back with her parents and enrolled in the University of Georgia as a nursing major.
But through a friend, she soon discovered that science was not her calling. Math education was. Ballet prepared Szatkowski for her pursuit of a teaching career in unexpected ways.
“Whether I’m performing ballet or I’m performing a math lesson, I really think ballet gave me that confidence to stand up in front of people that I don’t know and show them what I do know,” Szatkowski said.
If Szatkowski had stayed in dance, she may have become a star like Isabella Boylston, a girl she danced with who is now a principal with the American Ballet Theater.
Or like many of her other classmates, Szatkowski may have struggled to make ends meet with the underpaid, unstable career of most professional ballerinas.
But what could have been is not what matters. Szatkowski is happy with her life. If it weren’t for her change in career paths, she most likely would have never met her fiancé and Clarke Central High School head baseball coach Trey Henson, and wouldn’t have had an opportunity to explore her hidden passion for math education.
“I can look back and see myself making the decision when I was 13 years old to leave my parents and pursue something that I was interested in, and at the same time, I see myself as a 17-year-old looking at my life at that particular point and saying this isn’t what I want,” Szatkowski said. “I’m in control of my happiness.”
