Fall, 2003

On Becoming a Teacher

Becoming a teacher will be leveraging my unique background, fulfilling a dream, answering a calling, and taking on the biggest challenge of my life all in one. I have found the teaching and mentoring aspect of everything I have done in the last 20 years to be what I enjoy most of various roles I have played in the past years, and it has also been a continuous challenge to me personally to inspire and enrich the lives of all those I encounter. I have enjoyed my experiences and challenges at every job and in every situation so far, and I expect the teaching profession to also come with its balance of rewards and challenges. The more time I spend in the classroom as an observer but also as a student, it becomes clearer and clearer what teaching might look like for me. I realize that just as with having a first child, you can think you are completely informed and prepared only to discover just how very different your life has suddenly become.

I grew up as a quiet and unathletic child of immigrants. I never spoke English at home and I spent almost all of my summers in Germany living according to the norms of that culture. When it came to picking teams in sports, I was always picked last if at all. At first, I struggled at school as a child as English was my second/third language, but I always felt my parents believed in me and there were certain teachers along the way that motivated and encouraged me. I think none of my classmates would have predicted that I would one day become a national champion athlete and top executive at one of the world’s most successful software companies. They always thought of me as the kind and compassionate one without a competitive or striving bone in my body. I realized only much later how few people realize that ambition and success need not be contrary to compassion and fairness. I was inspired by various teachers and mentors along the way and have found passing such inspiration on to be the most rewarding part of my job and as an athlete and coach. For I have not only found success and happiness through teamwork for myself but also for my fellow employees and teammates. In fact, what has brought me success in the business and sports world is in part ambition but more so the ability to inspire and motivate those around me.

It wasn’t until 7^th grade trigonometry that I felt I could keep up with math, and then it suddenly somehow clicked. I got it when no one else in the class did. After a week went by and the class still didn’t get it, the teacher asked me to come up and try to explain it. I did, and the other kids “got it” within ½ and hour. I guess in some ways that’s where my teaching “career” began. Things started clicking more and more for me and I found myself helping other students more and more while discovering that one explanation might make sense to one student while it would be completely confusing to another.

I also believe to have inherited a strong moral and ethical conviction from my parents. Character education may not be at the top of the California teaching standards list, but I do feel that as a teacher you are held to a higher standard in terms of being a role model and mentoring children. I saw what it meant to stand by your values from my father who was head of the young democratic party in Germany when the Nazis came to power, and he is one of the few, if not only, surviving people that has been alone in a room with Hitler and Goebels, to be later incarcerated by the Nazis for treason and scheduled for execution only to be released by a stroke of luck. He never compromised his conviction on what he felt was right and at the age of 92. He is still very active today in writing to/for various papers and journals to ensure that the lessons we should all learn from that period are not lost and that the principles of democracy are understood outside of the US as well.

On my mother’s side, there is also a strong sense of moral conviction and for passing on one’s beliefs. I will be the fifth generation of teachers on her side of the family, and this has given me some perspective on what it means to be a teacher.

I have worked with children with learning disabilities (one class I observed in had eight special needs children in it) as well as “middle-of-the-road students and students that excel to the point of reading above high school comprehension levels all in the same third grade class. So, I got to experience the challenges of differentiated instruction and keeping all students challenged and progressing in parallel. This past fall, I also did a service learning project at JW Fair Middle School in San Jose in two RSP classes. The eighth grade students from this East San Jose School district came from a very different socio-economic and cultural background than most of the students I had worked with before.

I competed in and coached a sport called Ultimate Frisbee for 20 years. I played in numerous national and world championships. I am also a former national champion myself as well as having coached a national championship team. I have taken two players that were completely new to the sport and coached them to become national champions. Ultimate Frisbee is rather unique in that there are no referees. Players call their own fouls even at national and world championships. This is hard to fathom for anyone who hasn’t participated in this highly competitive sport, and it is one of the biggest challenges in educating athletes that come into this sport from other sports. It is also one of the most rewarding things to see when an athlete who is new to the sport begins to understand how much this adds to the sport and to the challenge on each individual. It is tough to call yourself out of bounds on the catch that would have won you the national championship, but by that time, players know well the reward of the pride they feel by being able to do so.

In business, I have taught several weeklong courses to help customers become proficient with our products, but more importantly teaching them how to continue to become more proficient themselves and to leverage each other in learning how to work more effectively with our products. However, the “teaching” I have done most in the business world is that of my employees (in my last position, I managed close to 200 people) and peers. Teaching them how to enjoy working while becoming contributing team members in highly successful organization has been very rewarding for me. One of the most valuable lessons I was able to teach is how much you can learn from your peers. One of the most valuable lessons I was able to teach my managers and team leads was how to balance their loads and still complete the required work while not burning out. In 20 years, I have shipped well over 100 product releases; every one being on time within a day (a rather unique accomplishment in the software business). In addition to mentoring engineers and managers, I also spent time helping engineers debug their programs. Even the most brilliant Ph.D. engineer occasionally has a logic flaw in eve his/her area of expertise. I could always track it down no matter how foreign the area was to me by letting them explain their logic to me so that I would understand it. In so doing, they would find it themselves. I learned a valuable lesson about how much we can learn by teaching others.

Although I started slow at school, I was the first ever to graduate from our high school after three years. I then went to the University of Virginia where, according to my dean, I was the first undergraduate to take enough classes for a triple major. I also fulfilled the requirements for a BS while haven taken enough humanities classes to complete the BA requirements. I completed the requirements for a major in physics, math and computer science while competing at an intercollegiate level and while working at Darden Business School Executive Program.

Last Spring, I took two classes (mostly students who were already teaching) through San Francisco State University. There was a great deal of discussion between us as to how easy/difficult it was to implement what we learned in class back in the classroom. I found this immediate feedback to be quite valuable. This past fall, I took six more psychology classes at San Jose State as well as two education classes through UC Berkeley Extension. I also completed and passed my CSET and CBEST exams. All my psychology classes have given me more insights into group dynamics and how children learn and interact. The UC Berkeley classes also gave me opportunity to work closely in small group with teachers from various parts of San Francisco, South San Francisco and the East Bay. I have also taken a couple of classes in early childhood education. It was very eye-opening to observe and associate with people working in the field of early childhood education in child care centers. They all come from various backgrounds which are often quite challenging themselves, and their views, objectives and interactions with children differ slightly from that I have seen with teachers in schools.

I love teaching and mentoring and I have very much enjoyed the time I have spent working and observing in school. Since 7^th grade, I have found tremendous reward in finding ways to make others learn, grow, enjoy and become independent. I certainly realize that each student is unique, and has their own way, rate and timing of learning. I also realize that I may not be able in every case to find a way to make it click, but I can certainly try by making their success be something they own and have it be about them and not me or anyone else. I view becoming a teaching as a very big, ongoing responsibility and challenge. I do feel I have my own unique qualifications and I am very passionate about becoming a teacher. No one that knows me or that I have worked with finds it surprising that I have made this choice to make a career change despite having found such success in my previous career. They all feel I will make an excellent teacher and that it fits with my passion, personality and conviction.

Fall, 2004

Update with recent classroom experiences:

For the first 15 weeks of 2004, I was engaged as a student teacher three days a week from 8:00-12:00 in Ms. Hilary Uchida’s first grade class at John Sinnot elementary school in the Milpitas Unified School District. My first semester of student teaching started out with observing and noting classroom routines and student and teacher interactions. Fate had it that Ms. Uchida called in sick one day and a substitute was assigned to her class who had never been in her classroom before. Not having expected to be out, Ms.Uchida had prepped for this absence as she otherwise did. When I arrived, the substitute was surprised to see me. He then suggested that since I seemed to know the classroom routines and students better than he that I teach the class that day and he would help if needed. I stayed until school let out. This apparently went so well that Ms. Uchida let me then teach a part of the day every day and I move from one subject area to the next.

One memorable experience came early on after a week of grading student papers where I discovered that practically no one in the class had grasped the concept being taught of “fact families” of four addition/subtraction (if 3+4=7 then 4+3=7, 7-4=3 and 7-3=4). I had also learned in my math curriculum class about the importance of using manipulatives and the significance of status within the classroom. There was one English Language Learner who understood very little English and was clearly viewed by the class as having low status in her abilities and place in the classroom. I pulled this student aside in view of the other students working on their math (realizing full well that this isn’t typically advisable). Having worked with this student using manipulatives and having gained her trust in my ability to help her, I felt confident we would be successful. She quickly grasped the concept. I then got her to do it in writing, and again, this was met with success. I then wrote down 123+234=357 and asked her to complete the fact family. She at first looked at me as though I couldn’t be serious. Then, with shaking hands, she wrote 234+123=357. The look of that face when I said “that’s write, go on…” is one I will never forget. In the mean time, the rest of the class had caught on that this child they consider to below all of them had grasped the principle behind fact families and when they came over and saw what she was doing, they we astonished. Within five minutes, her image of herself had changed dramatically, the image of her in the eyes of the other students had changed, and the image the other students had of themselves had also changed. Now, the other students had gained the confidence that perhaps they too could understand this concept, which had eluded them. I realized I was taking a calculated risk, but having had prior experiences with students that believed I would lead them to success, I felt that she believed enough that with my help she could be successful that she would be successful. What followed was an effort to help her believe she could do it without me.

For the next 8 weeks, I acted in the role of student teacher for Mrs. Goforth’s 4^th, 5^th and 6^th grade science classes. In these classes I stated out working with small groups on various projects and exercises. I then taught a few classes of the circulatory, respiratory, and digestive systems using materials from the textbook, various other books on the subject. Materials gathered from various web-sights and PowerPoint presentations I created. The most effective process, judging by the assessments I did after the lessons were those that combined audio visual introductions with some direct teaching, prepping for and then following through on some kinesthetic exercises that had students playing the roles of various parts of a system and interacting with one another followed by a closing exercise to review and assess what they had acted out and learned. This teaching experience also left me with the impression that every multiple subject teacher should have the opportunity to teach as a single subject teacher at least once. Teaching the same lesson back to back three times to 4^th, 5^th and 6^th graders had tremendous value in being able to immediately make changes to a lesson, apply them and see the impact. Teaching the first group of students, you might discover where things didn’t function so smoothly and why you barely covered the lesson within the allotted time. Having not had enough time for one class, it was interesting to discover what happened if you spent more time preparing the students for their activities before they started. Although this would leave the students less time to actually do the lesson (or activity or experiment), it often resulted in the lesson running more smoothly and actually completely earlier.

In the fall of 2003, I took a group dynamics psychology class, which included time in two RSP classrooms with eighth graders in East San Jose. Most of the students seemed to have been removed from their regular classrooms more due to attitude issues than learning issues. When I learned about the lives of these students, this wasn’t hard to understand. A book that had been recommended to me by a professor who taught at Juvenile Hall came to mind. I bought several used copies of Tupac Shakur’s The Rose That Grew From Concrete for the students. They seemed surprised that anyone would care enough to buy them a book, they thought it was cool to own a book by a rap star, which had been shot. They were also surprised that this rap star actually wrote poetry from the heart. They took it home and several of these 8^th graders told me at our next meeting that this was the first book they had ever read. They also told me which poem was their favorite and why, and suddenly they were open to reading and interpreting other poetry. Perhaps I was also able to connect with them a little having grown up in schools with guns and knives and having learned not to assume anyone was going to look out for you other than yourself.

Even though I have benefited from some very rewarding experiences teaching, mentoring and coaching, there have certainly also been challenges and disappointments. The fact that teaching is a job that comes with new and different challenges every day has not been lost on me.