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:
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.
- it’s actually not, but that was the name of one of my previous co-workers, so let’s just go with it [↩]
- Hashtag, asian teacher problems [↩]
- 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. [↩]
- by the way, this has happened SOOO many times this past month. [↩]
- Of course, it so turns out that McNeil won their first game and Round Rock is 0-1. Go figure. [↩]
- 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.”) [↩] - nor did I ever imagined that it would be. [↩]
- 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. [↩]
- 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… [↩]
- “this” meaning: knowing what I’d be leaving behind [↩]