I think most teachers – myself included – would never vent publicly about the difficulties of our profession — trust me, you couldn’t make up half of the stuff, nor could you imagine it unless you’ve been in our shoes.

But based on a number of things in life that have transpired over the past few weeks, this much I know:

If you have people in your life that you appreciate — including teachers1 — there’s nothing wrong with letting them know.

Because a new day does not always bring what one expects.

1. perhaps, especially teachers, since I’m biased… but this is not on my behalf, rather on behalf of my professional kin. [↩]

The cafeteria at the Oak Hill Motorola1 campus had great breakfast tacos. Bacon egg potato cheese on grilled tortilla.

That’s all I was thinking about as I made my way from the parking garage into the lobby and saw the mob of people crowded around the television. For a selfish second I could only think of bacon egg potato cheese on grilled tortilla as I made my way towards MOS-11 that morning, thirteen years ago today, when I heard a guy explain to a friend that walked in just before me:

“Another plane just flew into the other tower from behind…”

Like anybody else will tell you: the rest of the day — nay, the week — was beyond surreal. 2 One of my coworkers and I had a conversation about how our different cultures3 tend to handle such national tragedies — would we sensationalize it on the news, or try to put it out of our memory and pretend it never happened? In the aftermath of the dot-com bubble burst — and in the context of the global economy — what happened that day may have marked an inflection point towards the current chapter of my journey, which began five years later (eight years ago, today).

That was before Facebook and Twitter and smartphones.4

A couple of years ago I asked my students what they remembered about that day. 5 Most of them told me that that was the day that they got to watch TV all day, and that their parents cried a lot.

I was eight when the Challenger explosion happened, and I barely understood much about that. 6

Yesterday I told my students that I actually remember life before the internet, and they asked me what that was like. I paused before answering, and said,

“It was easier to hide from parents.”

That apparently drew some heartfelt agreement. Seems that a lot of their parents track them via their smartphones. I cannot imagine life as a teenager like that.7

Tomorrow marks the close of the first 5-day week of the school year. While it’s been an exhausting one,8 it wasn’t close to being that bad.

1. later Freescale [↩]
2. Newspaper front pages showed pictures of people that were caught above the floors where the plane hit choosing to escape from the tower by diving off the tower head-first — images that I will never forget [↩]
3. He was Indian, I’m Korean [↩]
4. Hey, iPhone 6 preorders begin tonight~ [↩]
5. today’s high school seniors were 4 or 5 on nine-eleven [↩]
6. I *do* remember that my school teachers were saying that one of the astronauts was a teacher — Christa McAuliffe — and that my friends laughed when some of the teachers said out loud, “that could’ve been me!” [↩]
7. Uh, not that I ever did anything bad when I was a kid, of course. [↩]
8. filled with grading AP Stat papers [↩]

I cannot for the life of me remember why, but back in Season 5,1 I started the habit of wearing either a solid white or black shirt on major test days:

It was one of those weird things that I continued for every single test day in my AP Stat classes that I’m not sure anyone ever picked up on. I’d wear white for A-day, then black for B-day… and then swap for the next exam, and so forth.

I finally broke away from this sometime the middle of last year,2 for no better a reason than why I started.3 But tomorrow is our first major exam of the new year,4 anddddd…

In my fifth year of teaching the subject, there aren’t a whole lot of “firsts” to be had, but this is definitely the first time that I have only taught one prep. And when it comes time to grade piles of papers, that means grading six periods’ worth of the same thing.5 For you math teachers who have never graded AP Stat exams: It’s an acquired taste.

Open House was last night, and while it’s always a bit nerve-wracking to meet parents in the new neighborhood for the first time, I was incredibly fortunate enough to have nothing but kindness and cordiality from the new locals.67 It was during last night — on top of everything that transpired this past week8 — that I realized how fortunate and blessed I am to have had circumstances fall into place just the way they did, when they did.

Three weeks into the new journey, and things are finally starting to feel like home. The perennial feeling of homesickness has slowly9 worn off a bit, and I don’t feel like a fish-out-of-water as much as a few weeks ago.10

1. 2011-12 [↩]
2. after about two years [↩]
3. which is to say: for no reason, really. [↩]
4. in the new place [↩]
5. It also means teaching the same lesson six times in a row every time… that’s a whole other #firstworldproblem [↩]
6. I still remember my very first Open House when I got angrily chewed out by some of the parents of my Pre-AP Algebra II students… I’ll tell ya, that stuff sticks with you FOR-EVER. [↩]
7. I did, however, have one set of parents ask me if I had met “Mr. Nguyen” — which is the fictitious name for the other Asian teacher on campus. Meh. [↩]
8. with my grandmother’s passing and my subsequent trip to California [↩]
9. but surely [↩]
10. Incidentally, if you’re on my FB, today was the day of the Apple keynote “flunk” funny… [↩]

It’s only been a week at my new campus, which is to say that I’ve seen my students twice.

But it has already happened.

See, there’s a science teacher on my new campus that is an Asian male (you know where I’m going with this, maybe). Let’s just pretend that his name is “Mr. Nguyen”1

In three of my six classes, I have had a student ask,

“Are you friends with Mr. Nguyen yet?”

In all three classes, you get a rough copy of the following series of events:
A handful of kids chuckle, some kid next to her looks down in apparent embarrassment and says “Oh, no you didn’t”, and I look around with a face that says “oh that’s cute.”23

Other “fun” details of my first week as a Dragon:

On my first day of school, second period, I led off with,

“My name is Mr. Youn, and this is my first year here at McNe… nooOOOo…”4

Interestingly, a number of the students laughed, as if they already knew of where I came from.

That same class period, a kid asks about my policy regarding food and drink in the classroom. When I was done explaining, of course, one smart guy pipes up with the words,

So… no alcohol?

When I flashed my “seriously?!” face, another kid a few rows over adds,

Yeah. We’re not like those McNeil kids.

When I then quizzically asked them about their perception of “McNeil kids”, I got a colorful variety of responses, one of which was:

There’s somebody that’s worse than us at football.56

Of course, starting over in a new place isn’t all fun and games.7

This past May, on the Tuesday before our Statistics AP Exam, a pair of students came to visit me in the afternoon — one was a student that I had in class the year previous, and the other was a junior at the time, who was considering taking either Calculus AB or AP Stat for his senior year. Apparently concerned with rumors that I might be leaving, this student asked me,

“Are you going to be teaching AP Statistics next year?”

And I told him, in a partial truth, “Yes.” 8

When he heard that, he immediately let out a huge sigh of relief, which I found curious, so I asked him, straight-up:

“Hypothetically, if I was not teaching Stat next year, would you still take it?”

His response still floors me a bit to this day:

Without hesitating, he said, “No.”9

And in my never-ending weighing of the pros-and-cons of the decision-making process, I always knew without a doubt that this10 is the sort of thing that would be the most difficult part of leaving and starting over elsewhere.

But just like any other school year — or anything else in life, for that matter — one foot in front of the other, one day at a time.

1. it’s actually not, but that was the name of one of my previous co-workers, so let’s just go with it [↩]
2. Hashtag, asian teacher problems [↩]
3. I kinda wanted to respond with something to the effect of, “You never go up to your white teachers and ask if they’re friends with their other white teachers, just because they’re white…” … but that may have been a bit much. [↩]
4. by the way, this has happened SOOO many times this past month. [↩]
5. Of course, it so turns out that McNeil won their first game and Round Rock is 0-1. Go figure. [↩]
6. Other responses I heard regarding “McNeil people”:
   — “A lot of us went to the same middle school so we’re still friends with a lot of them.”
   — “They think they’re smarter than us and they call us ‘ratchet’ or whatever…”
   — “Aren’t they the rich school?” (a number of other students quickly retorted with, “No, that’s Westwood.”) [↩]
7. nor did I ever imagined that it would be. [↩]
8. Technically, it was the truth. Although I knew I would be teaching at a different school, I also knew that I would still be teaching AP Stat. But I admit it was slimy and you have my permission to throw glitter and tomatoes at me. [↩]
9. For the record, I really, REALLY hope he changed his mind and took it anyway. At the time I could only say so much, as I didn’t want news of my transfer to get out for another week… [↩]
10. “this” meaning: knowing what I’d be leaving behind [↩]