My Favorite Teacher

Mr. Wong. He was my favorite teacher of all time. He was my middle school health teacher who said this during our sex education quiz, “I am the tester, and you are the….”

He infused humor in a lot of his teaching, but it wasn’t to make up for a lack of knowledge. He was actually very intelligent, and able to answer questions with a quick wit. I guessed he was a doctor at one time before he became a teacher. To this day, I don’t know if that was true or not.

But it wasn’t the humor or his intelligence that truly made him great in my eyes. Mr. Wong treated his students with a blend of respect and kindness that was noticeable to all of us, and it seemed like he really loved to teach. Overall, you can tell it was a joy to be in his class, even for him.

Because of Mr. Wong, I had aspirations of being in the medical field back then. Although, that never materialized, I am finally pursuing something that is pseudo-medical. I can’t attribute that to Mr. Wong though. What I can attribute to him is that learning can be fun, to laugh a little, to respect others, to treat others kindly, and to enjoy what you do.

Thank you, Mr. Wong, for being my favorite teacher!

Wake up, Sleepyhead

"Something. Write something," says the voice in my head that is assertive, which is a nice word for bossy. "Hey, I motivate you!" Whatever, dude. A lot of things have changed since I last wrote a blog post. Do people even blog anymore?

So what changed? Well, for starters, I'm a freakin Dad (excuse my juvenile language). My son, the bundle of joy and speed-crawler of terror, is nearing his first birthday. And yes, I'm still alive-- maybe a little sleep-deprived but alive. Those of you who want to have kids, let me tell you... It's doable, but... yeah... you'll find out when you have one. Don't get me wrong, I love my son so much. He brings me so much joy, and I love being a parent. But there's a reason why it took me so long to write on here. So much energy goes into raising your first child (major bummer for the second one-- yeah, I was a second).

You are learning as you go. It's kind of a bad analogy, but I'm going to stick with it. It's sort of like learning to ride a bike without training wheels, which is how I pretty much learned. I figured out it was easier to keep my balance if the bike was moving. With this knowledge, I took the bike to the top of the sloping pavement, got on, and took off on those two wheels. "Awesome! This is so cool! I'm riding a bike! Oh hey, there's a dumpster. Wait. Uh, I'm headed toward the dumpster. Oh crap." So yeah, I figured out how to get moving on a bike, but I didn't yet master how to steer. Like a kamikaze magnet, I was drawn in by the big green metal dumpster. *SMASH*

As a new parent, you hit the ground running once that baby pops out (again excuse my juvenile language). "He's so cute! This is so cool! I'm a parent! Crap. I put the diaper on wrong. Let me just... My face! I got peed in the face!" There's moments-- many moments where you get to learn on the job how to raise a child. There's a lot of good advice out there, but you tend to forget a lot of it because there is no time to think. That's when instinct kicks in, and I think the beauty of being a parent is that the ability to raise children is somehow innate. We have it in us to be able to take on the responsibility, even if we don't think it's possible. There's a correlation I can make to faith and relationship to God, but I'm going to skip that because I'd rather discuss those sort of things in person.

So yeah, I managed to figure out how to get my parenting wheels rolling, but there's still a ton more obstacles that I'll have to crash into and get up and learn from to keep those wheels rolling. As you can imagine, priorities are a lot different for me. But it's not just being a new parent. I'm also a returning college student. What? Why would I want to go back to the academic treasure of knowledge known as college? Wasn't it that for you went you last went?

Actually, I'll admit it-- I was a piss-poor college student in my first stint of college (sorry, juvenile language again). College wasn't really about learning in my classes, it was more about unfurling my social-wings. I was still a walnut in my shell when I just got out of high school, and college was the nutcracker that broke this nut out. Did that come out right? Oh well, you get my drift. So academically, I really didn't know what I was doing. I was taking classes that sounded fun and what my friends were taking, like Asian American studies (glass ceilings and affirmative action). Next thing I knew, I was a junior, and what the heck was I going to major in? Long story short, I decided to major in Geography because 1- I like maps, 2- some of my friends declared it as a major, 3- there was some promising job prospects in GIS (Geographic Information Systems) upon graduating, 4- I did all right on my intro to Geography class my sophomore year.

Fast-forward to now, I've got a couple of years of cartography (map-making) experience and almost 10 years of accounting office work. I won't get into the transition here, but let's just say I figured out Geography wasn't for me career-wise. And now I figured out that accounting wasn't for me career-wise either. What shall I choose? How about one of the hardest graduate programs to get into? SLP, I choose you! Brokemon!

So I'm currently doing a Post-baccalaureate program at UW for Speech and Hearing Sciences, and I plan on moving on to the graduate program to be a Speech-Language Pathologist. The reason is... another story for another day. Somehow, I just knew this was what I needed to do. So I've been subjecting myself to the rigors of writing essays and taking Scantron tests, which is all not that bad. But when you add a baby in the mix, things get a little hazy.

I sometimes wake suddenly with a sleeping baby in my arms, and I reorient myself. This is not a dream. I really am a dad, and I really am studying for a career I want. That's something.