“How did I end up a teacher?”

Sometimes I have this thought. It might be reflecting back on the school year and thinking over the many events, pondering if I could see myself continuing along this path; other times it is like right now, when I eagerly anticipate the coming school year and wondering about what the school year will bring and how I can best teach and reach my students; and perhaps during the school year when I have bad days, and good days, and days where I can only reply “That’s above my pay grade.” Maybe it’s when I think about my own culture and what “asians” value.

tl;dr it’s random

But I have thought long and hard about it in my head, and yet I’ve never written it into being. So here’s an attempt.

All of my asian friends’ parents are doctors.

This statement was something my naive elementary-school-grade self believed. I grew up on the island of Galveston, TX and attended a chinese church there where many of the congregation, like my parents, worked at the University of Texas Medical Branch (UTMB). So it could have been true, all my asian friends could have had parents that were doctors - but alas it was not. To my young self, working in medicine meant being a doctor. It was not until much later I learned about nurses and therapists and other medical occupations.

Anyways, I had this conceived notion that I wanted to become a doctor when I was little. A pathologist like my dad in fact. It wasn’t that my parents ever pressured me into becoming a doctor - I have no recollection of my parents ever directing or insisting on my path towards medicine like I heard many of my peers complain about. I was intrinsically motivated to become one.

There’s more that can be said about growing up in a very diverse daycare (William Temple), having a fairly diverse friend group in elementary school (Trey Orange, Carlos Rodriguez, Daniel Du, Shamis Khan), going to a magnet middle school and joining orchestra and having for the first time in my life a majority asian friend group (Westbrook Intermediate), and then attending high school and being a first generation American high school student and navigating those waters (what are AP classes, what is GPA, what is the SAT, etc.). Those are for another time.

Fast forward to applying for college. I decided to apply for a biomedical engineering major because 1) I was interested in pursuing medicine; 2) I wanted the possibility of pursuing a career in biomedical engineering (whatever that meant to my high school self); and 3) I didn’t want just the knowledge/theory in college without being able to put it in practice - I believed the engineering portion would allow me to create and make and test the material I was learning. I decided to go to UT Austin and entered as a freshman in Fall 2012.

Fast-forward. I took OChem and PChem, Genetics and various labs, and took care of the majority - if not all - of my premed requirements by the end of freshman year. I also was able to help with some research under a graduate student. This research experience made me realize I could not do graduate school for biomedical engineering. The sheer number of hours of data collection, setting up and tearing down experiments, applying for grants and writing papers - it was not something I looked forward to.

The summer after my freshman year, I shadowed a cardiologist near where I grew up. I watched as he spent but the briefest of moments with each patient, barely taking any time to make conversation and only making his rounds. I don’t fault him for it - I don’t know the demands of cardiologists and how many patients he had to see (he had to commute between two different hospitals) - but it was far different from the picture painted by the books I read as a kid (looking at you The Christmas Shoes and My Sister’s Keeper). Based on this perception of working as a physician, I decided I did not want to become one.

Now I had a conundrum, what career path to follow? Becoming a doctor, pursuing a graduate degree, both of these were no longer options for me. One option was left - entering the industry with a bachelors degree, which wasn’t ideal for a biomedical engineer. It was this time, Fall of my Sophomore year, when I found out one of my friends was taking a teaching class through the UTeach program. I thought, “Why not?” and signed up for the class with them. Wow - what a blast. Besides a not-so-great teaching partner, I had a blast learning about the theory of how people learn, teaching elementary schoolers, and the great community. I took the next course, then the next, and by the end of sophomore year I was strongly considering going into teaching after I retired from a career in engineering.

This all changed in late July. I visited my home church to debrief them and got into a conversation with an old family friend. This auntie had a daughter that had also studied biomedical engineering. I started sharing about my idea of becoming a teacher and the auntie immediately started saying, in an incredulous tone, why I would do something like that. Why would you put all that effort in getting a biomedical engineering degree only to become a teacher? In Asian culture, you don’t talk back to your elders, especially aunties you grew up with. However, I was definitely fuming, albeit silently. As I withstood the barrage of rebuke, I started thinking about going directly into teaching as a form of rebellion. And - the more I thought about it, why not?

Why not go into teaching right after college? This idea started taking root in the deepest parts of my mind. I thought more about it - why not? What was keeping me from going into teaching? After some further thought, I managed to break my reasons down into manageable chunks:

  1. I valued security. Engineering jobs are pretty steady and I thought it would be fairly simple for me to get a job.
  2. I valued the ability to provide for my family as the breadwinner. Being able to make enough money to allow my spouse to stay at home if they wanted to, and being able to support and raise and send kids to college - what an idea.
  3. I valued the prestige. If you’re an engineer, you’re looked upon as someone having a great career, even moreso in Asian cultures. Despite not wanting to give value to this - I did.
  4. I valued creating. There’s the idea of creating things unique to yourself that I have always liked. Being able to solve problems and create solutions to things was something I wanted to find in a job.

I evaluated these values with my other values: being independent, breaking norms, doing what I want to do and like to do, doing what I feel called to do at this point in my life, my past experiences, finding meaning, and more. Long story short, after a long period of introspection and thought, I decided to go right into teaching after graduating.

Afterwards, I focused my coursework and extracurriculars on becoming the best teacher I could be. That’s how I got into upper division math and programming courses, TA-ing for classes, and other stuff.

That is the story of how I embarked on my teaching career. There’s more to tell - how I started teaching computer science, my philosophy on grades, my extracurriculars/jobs - but that will be for another time.