Jason Dean didn’t expect to be teaching people how to drive an 80,000-pound vehicle for a living. He also didn’t expect his daughter would wind up walking the halls of the same Chattanooga campus as a newly licensed dental assistant.
Skyler Dean graduated from Miller-Motte College’s dental assistant program in September and, at not quite 21, is already explaining the difference between a life that looks good on paper and one that actually fits. She’d tried the traditional route at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga, double majoring in criminal law and psychology, then walked away.
“I ended up feeling like it wasn’t for me,” she says.
Finding the right fit
In the Dean family, that kind of pivot isn’t treated like failure. It’s treated like information.
Jason, 46, is the CDL program director at Miller-Motte’s Chattanooga campus. He’s been on campus almost two years, promoted into the director role about a year ago. Before all that, he spent 23 years in the Navy. The job history that followed his exit from the service sounds like whiplash.
“In my first two and a-half years after I left the service, I quit five jobs,” he says.
The reason wasn’t fickleness. It was a line he wouldn’t let employers cross.
“As soon as management or corporate lied about something, I walked straight out the door with zero hesitation.”
He tells that story like a lesson he hopes his children absorb without being lectured.
“You have to have your own self-worth,” he says. “I don’t care who you are, you’re not going to lie to me like that.”
When Jason interviewed at Miller-Motte, he didn’t hide his job-hopping. He laid it out for Dr. Kimberly Miller, the campus president and executive director, along with a warning: if he was lied to again, he’d leave. Her response still sticks with him because it was so simple and so direct.
“Jason, I will be the one that changes your faith in humanity.”
He says she did.
“Just the pure honesty,” he says. “You hear some people say, ‘I’m brutally honest.’ You don’t have to be mean to be honest. Just be honest.”
Jason describes a campus culture that doesn’t dim after orientation, a place where the energy “never runs out.” He talks with students who aren’t in his program. He steps into other classrooms when instructors need someone to play a role.
“Whatever a student needs,” he says, describing moments when medical assistant students ask him to be the nervous patient or the argumentative one as a way to help them practice handling stress before it’s real.
That idea – controlled stress before the stakes are high – is built into his program. Jason’s version of career education isn’t romantic. It’s pragmatic and, in his mind, moral.
“’I do not care if you don’t graduate the program,’” he told his students once, a statement he admits earned him “a little bit of trouble.”
Then he explains why he says it.
Teaching more than how to drive
“I care about one thing. Are you going to kill my family or others on the interstate? That’s my biggest concern. We’re going to teach you to operate 80,000 pounds safely.”
The training, he says, is more than showing up and learning how to steer. It’s reading people, figuring out what kind of learner they are, why they’re there and what’s getting in their way.
“Adult learners are absolutely the hardest people to teach,” he says, describing how grown students will punish themselves for not getting something quickly. “’I should know this. Why isn’t this coming faster?’”
He’s learned to flip the script.
“I’ll say, ‘Are you a truck driver? No. Then why do you think you should know this information?’”
Jason sometimes builds confidence by letting students prove him wrong. He describes a moment with a student who was struggling to memorize the pre-trip inspection, the systematic walkaround drivers must perform before rolling: engine oil, windshield wipers, fuel tanks, tires and the rest.
She was “very down on herself and very self-conscious,” he says. “And she kept repeating, ‘I’m not getting it.’”
So Jason intentionally misstated something about the pre-trip. When she corrected him, he argued back, pushing her to defend what she knew. Afterward, he simply conceded and walked away. The point wasn’t to win. It was to show her, unmistakably, that she already had the knowledge.
“She didn’t believe it until she proved the program director was wrong,” he says. “Her confidence went through the roof.”
Learning by doing
The same campus philosophy – hands-on, confidence-building, oriented toward real-world competence – was what drew Skyler in, even though she was trying to keep her education separate from her father’s job.
“When I started, I was like, ‘You have nothing to do with this. I’m doing this on my own,’” she says.
Jason backed her up, to the point of telling staff, “If she doesn’t tell me what’s happening in class, then I don’t know about it. That’s her business.”
Skyler’s path into dental wasn’t a scripted handoff from dad to daughter. It was more like a door being held open long enough for her to decide whether she wanted to walk through. Jason had already started working at Miller-Motte, and she came to meet her future instructors.
“They were so nice and showed me everything we’d be doing,” she says. “It’s a very hands-on program, which I really liked. I’m way better with everything being hands-on than just, ‘Here, read and learn this book.’”
The program ran 15 months, built around five-week courses. Skyler lists the credentials like someone ticking items off a checklist.
“We earned our X-ray certifications, our CPR license, our first aid license,” plus training on assisting techniques and instrument passing. Students practiced on one another and brought in outside patients for basics like brushing, flossing, molds and retainers.
At the end came externships: 15 weeks in actual dental offices, including two different placements so she could see different sides of the field.
If anything lit her up, it was imaging.
“I really like doing X-rays,” she says. “I caught on quickly. It was something that clicked in my brain.”
Skyler describes learning to position X-rays so well she could do them on herself, then described the thrill of seeing the dental imaging software.
“The computer program can display a 3D image of the teeth. It was fascinating.”
Her captivation with the imaging technology is part of why she’s considering radiology next. The idea, she says, is to start with X-ray credentials and then add modalities like ultrasound, MRI and CT.
“So I could really be doing all four of them.”
Skyler’s reasoning wasn’t rooted in dissatisfaction with dental but in a refusal to be boxed in early.
“I think it’s really good to be able to do multiple things and not necessarily stick to one thing,” she says. “Even when you graduate high school, I feel like you’re pushed to do one thing. That’s not what I wanted to do.”
Skills that open doors
That restlessness sounds familiar to her father, who jokes that she inherited it from him. He describes a career pattern of running toward complicated problems.
“Every three to five years I was moving on to something else,” he says. “Basically, I was chasing chaos.”
In the military, that instinct was shaped by constant change and intense training, from diesel mechanics to tactical security after 9/11, and from weapons proficiency to becoming a master training specialist. Even now, he says, he can feel the itch: once a system is fixed and running smoothly, he wants the next challenge.
At home, that same pragmatic streak shows up in money talks. Jason says his goal with his children has never changed.
“I just want them to be happy. I don’t care what they do.”
But he also wants them to start adulthood right-side up. When Skyler wanted to move closer to UTC for the “traditional college life,” he pushed back with the math.
“’Baby, that’s a 45-minute drive. Save the money,’” he told her. “’In this economy, I want you to have a bankroll you can start on.’”
They built a budget together that sets aside 20% of every paycheck. He frames it as protection against how quickly life can tilt.
“We’re one medical bill away from being homeless,” he says.
In that sense, the story of Jason and Skyler Dean isn’t a neat tale about a daughter following her father into the same trade. It’s something looser and more recognizably modern: a family that treats careers as experiments, education as a tool and self-respect as nonnegotiable.
One of them teaches students to shoulder the responsibility of 80,000 pounds on the interstate. The other is learning how to build a life from skills that keep opening new doors. Both, in different classrooms, are practicing the same lesson: it’s OK not to know yet as long as you’re willing to learn.