This Teacher Learns a Hard Lesson

Hello and a happy belated Memorial Day to you all! In my last post I told you all how I worked myself to insanity and back in order to be a teacher only to quickly find out that I didn't actually like to teach. Let's talk about that for a minute because I certainly don't want to diss ANY of my amazing teacher friends and family (shout out to Jennifer Pecorella!).

I worked at East Harlem Scholars Academy (EHSA), a Charter School that had preference for students from East Harlem, especially those that were special needs or English Language Learners. At the time the school was in its first year, so in addition to teaching, teachers were expected to put their oars in and contribute in any other way that interested them. For me, that meant doing data analysis for the school. When potential investors would come to visit they would want to see certain metrics that proved the effectiveness of the program. I helped by showing many of the teachers how to track some of this data, building the Excel Workbooks that they could use, and doing some of the data analysis for the head honchos to present to these investors.

As the school Spanish teacher I taught Kindergarten and First grade in a total of six classes a day, four days a week, for 45 minutes a day. It was exactly as I had dreamed it would be - full-time Spanish in small groups in a pull-out model. Teaching this age group is really fun because we got to play games and sing songs all day to the point that they may not have even known they were learning. (Video below is two of my first-grade students dancing together after I taught a lesson about salsa.) By the end of the year it was incredible to see how much they had learned. Reminiscing about it even now, it seems like something I loved, but then I remember the parts that I didn't.





The biggest reason was that as a language teacher you have to teach the same exact lesson to each group of students. And as a charter school, they didn't want us to deviate much from the lesson plan. Saying the exact same thing four times in a row was something that drove me crazy. I couldn't handle that much repetition. By the end of the year I realized that this really just wasn't for me. While there are many amazing teachers out there who are made to this work, I wasn't one of them.


When I first made this realization I was a little annoyed at myself for spending all of that time and energy to get this far only to find that I didn't like my "dream job." My sister, Katie, is a nurse and when she was in school they put the students in the hospitals right away and had them learning hands-on. Many students dropped-out within that first year because they realized right away that nursing wasn't for them. When you go to school to be a teacher you don't really get that hands-on experience until the very end of your education. At that point I had a sneaking suspicion that I wouldn't love teaching but felt like maybe it was jitters and that I was almost done so I should just finish. I can't help but think that if the program was structured differently that I would have made this realization earlier and changed career paths but it wasn't and I didn't so I decided to move on.

It's scary to try something completely new but both of my parents love their jobs so I knew there was a niche out there for me too. I just hadn't found it yet. Looking back, I'm proud of myself for making this tough decision. There are so many people who stay in a career that they don't like for so long because learning something completely new is hard.

After that year at EHSA I realized that I enjoyed the data analysis I was doing more than the teaching. I went back to my roots and found a job at Global Insulation Inc, a small non-union insulation company on Long Island. I worked there for four years as their data analyst / tech adviser and I loved it. I started by improving their systems like I did at NYU and moved on to making new projects in Excel and Google Sheets to help take over some of the manual calculations they were doing. Eventually, the projects I made were so robust that they were becoming too large for Excel / Sheets. It was at that time that I thought about moving some of these projects to the web.

My son, Tino, in his </head> <body> onesie
that my teachers gave me.

I considered becoming a front-end developer because of my art background. I took a course at General Assembly while I was pregnant with my son. I loved the coding aspect of this course but didn't feel as enthusiastic about the User Experience (UX) end of it. I liked making the page look pretty but studying the different kinds of fonts that should be used together and making so many different color choices wasn't for me. I studied back-end programming on my own at Code Academy and enjoyed the work I was doing but then actually missed seeing how things lay out on the page and being in charge of making it prettier. After meeting with a few schools and bootcamps I decided with mobile development I could get the best of both worlds! And who better to design apps than someone who has over 200 on her phone and loves each and every one of them deeply.

I enrolled here at TurnToTech and I am absolutely head-over-heels in LOVE with mobile development. I'm so excited to finally find the career for me and can't wait to get my first job as a programmer.

Next week I'll tell you the meaning behind the blog name, "Always Googliando." Until then, happy coding! :)

Steadfast at Steinhardt

Welcome back to 'Always Googliando,' where we're taking a trip down memory lane in response to readers asking me about my blog name and my back story. We'll pick up here where My Start At SUNY New Paltz left off.

I graduated from SUNY New Paltz in 2008 with a double major in Spanish and Italian and a minor in Art Studio. Wanting to teach I knew I had to get my masters in Education to acquire the necessary certifications. I chose NYU because they offer a program to get a dual certification in foreign language and ESL education. With certs in two foreign languages and ESL I would be more marketable when looking for a job.

The problem with NYU was that it's a small fortune to attend. I've had a job since I was 11 years old. If there's one thing I know how to do it's work and work hard. I did some research and found out that if you work for NYU Langone Medical Center in the School of Medicine that you get partial tuition remission. I applied to anything and everything and got myself an AMAZING job in the Emergency Department. More on that later.




I lived in a one-bedroom apartment (that we split into a small 3 bedroom) in Stuy Town with one of my brothers, Joe and my cousin, Danny. Joe is a rubyist and one of the few extremely intelligent guys that I know that also happens to have a wonderful, non-droid-like personality. Most evenings he can be found at his standing desk, coding the hours away while singing and dancing to Ghostland Observatory. (Side note, he now owns his own company, Def Method. A future blog about that in the future!) Danny is a kind, hilarious and unabashed soul who enjoys a good time with good people. He shamelessly does and says whatever he is in the mood to do and say. Many times it's something sweet but most of the time it's something so ridiculously funny that you burst out laughing somewhere inappropriate - like an art museum or a school play. It was important to have these knuckleheads in my corner because going to school at NYU, student teaching, and working a full-time job turned out to be a little tricky.

Me and Joey - not sure what we're doing here...

Danny during a blizzard in his Estrada glasses.

This is a ninja.

At NYU I was hired by Jessica Kovac as an assistant to the Faculty Group Practice for the ER. Basically I started doing data entry and a little data analysis. Having zero background in that sorta thing I took every single professional development course that NYU had to offer, which was a lot. They have classes on everything from handling stress to Advanced Microsoft Office. I took them all and I got pretty good at that data analysis thing. So good, in fact, I improved all of the existing programs that we had so that most were automated and the rest were 10 times faster than they were when I started. I was a computer ninja with a black belt in Excel.

My coworker, Meaghan, and I winning a Team
Achievement award at NYU.

At that point, my coworker and I struggled with whether to let our supervisor know and risk losing full-time status. In the end, we showed her what we had done and she was so impressed that she not only assigned us new, more interesting projects to work on, but met with us individually to hear about our other interests and helped us seek out opportunities at the hospital that we would enjoy. Whenever anyone asks me who the best boss I ever had was, Jessica Kovac is always my answer; for this reason and many more.

I spent two happy years at NYU as a data analyst and then one kind of insane year where student teaching came into play. I met with Jessica to devise a way that I could fit all three priorities in my life and ended up with a schedule where I got up at 4:30 each morning and got home around 9:30 each night. Jessica reminded me that she already knew how hard of a worker I was and that if I finished what needed to get done to just leave - not to stay the full hours just for the sake of it. She trusted my work. Like I said, best boss ever.

Hanging out after class with our teacher.

Joe and Danny did their best to take the burden off me as well. Danny took over cooking most of the meals and Joe took over the shopping. They split some of the chores but, being the neat freak I am, I still spent a lot of my weekends tidying things up. After the first semester, even with all of that help, I was still a wreck. The culmination of stress and exhaustion happened when I woke up and actually hallucinated. Then later that day I was on my way to meet my mom at Penn to go home for the weekend. I had to stop the bus early and run off to vomit behind a Halal stand in front of Macy's. In December, Macy's is pretty crowded with people looking at the Christmas windows so I was lucky enough to have a great audience for this low-point.

Me and Momsie the Bobmsie

That weekend my mom (aka "momsie the bombsie" aka the best mom ever) helped me come up with a plan for the second (and last) semester to de-stress further. She agreed to come in to Manhattan every Wednesday to cook me dinner, clean my apartment and relax with me. A huge sacrifice for her in money and time, especially time away from my dad. Yes, they're one of those rare couples that are still madly in love after 36 years. A friend of mine also suggested that I get out more on the weekends (you know, instead of sleeping and studying the whole time), even if it meant coming to her place to watch a movie or doing something else low-key. With even more people helping me, I made it through the last semester with my sanity in tact.

I'd say if there was a theme for my life that I started to tap into at this point it would be that I can accomplish absolutely ANYTHING that I want as long as I want it badly enough and have my family by my side. No one accomplishes anything great without some support from their loved ones. Whether that means encouragement from your sister, 30 Rock marathons with your mother to clear your head, or Whisky Fridays with your brother and cousin to escape the monotony, you are so much better off if you let those people, who genuinely want to help you succeed, in.

Steinhardt graduation, 2011
From Left to Right: Me, Jonna Dowling, Shannon Reilly

I graduated NYU with a 4.0 and a master's degree in both Foreign Language and ESL, grades K-12. Not only that, but I had gained this data analysis expertise to my skill set. I went into the job search confident and found a job within a month as a Spanish teacher.

Who knew I wouldn't like teaching?

Join me next week to catch up to present-day Erica. Leaving a job as a teacher after that blood, sweat, and tears (not to mention about $60K in student loans) and following a brand new path.

My Start at SUNY New Paltz

Greetings, my lovely readers and welcome to the third installment of 'Always Googliando'. At this point I've had a few questions regarding the name of the blog and requests for more information about my back-story. I'll start with the back-story since the name of the blog is informed by my professional experience and my own personal interests.

In 2004 I graduated High School and went off to SUNY New Paltz. A funky little state school, it's located just an hour south of Albany and is, as far as I'm concerned, the best school in America. The students range the gamut from hippies to cool city kids to Long Island goofballs (such as myself) and somehow, despite what most sitcoms and news reports would like you to believe, everyone really got along. Sir Thomas More would be proud.

SUNY New Paltz campus.

Me with Shades Step Team, 2007.

In addition to the harmony of the campus, there was a wonderful range of classes offered and clubs to join. I truly felt that whatever I was interested in I could try, and I did! I was a proud member of Shades Step team and I went Salsa dancing every weekend. I took a course on cultural influences in storytelling, another on defaming most of the people I had considered "American heroes" for my entire life (cough cough, Christopher Columbus), and even learned so much about geographical hazards that I had nightmares about the east coast drowning in a Tsunami caused by a landslide in La Palma. This was all perfect for me since I had no clue what I wanted to do with my life.


Exploring everything showed me where my interests lay. It was in studying languages that I awoke a hidden passion. I declared a double major in both Spanish and Italian with a minor in Art Studio (concentration in ceramics). If that seems a bit over-ambitious (or even crazy) then you're seeing just the beginning of a pattern. I saw a future as a language teacher. While I loved the Italian language and personally gained a lot from learning it, being the proud Italian-American that I am, I knew that my job prospects would be much better learning Spanish since that is the second-most widely spoken language in the United States, especially in states like New York where I grew up. The art minor was just for fun.

Somewhere between declaring my majors in the end of my freshman year and my graduation in 2008 I finished all my course-work, studied abroad in Italy for 10 months, and met my now husband (stories for another day). From there I went on to New York University for my master's.

How did I pay for school at NYU? Why am I programming now if I went to school to be a teacher? How do you say "Give me all the pizza you have" in Italian? Answers to these burning questions and more next week! Until then, happy Googling!

Digital Leash

Hello to my fellow googlers, developers, tech heads, and bored friends looking to fill the time. You are all readers of my blog and therefore I love you equally. Back this week, as promised, to tell you about the, slightly controversial, "Parent-Child Apps."

So we've all seen (and have opinions about) parents walking down the sidewalk dragging their unruly child(ren) on a leash. There's no judgment here. We have one for my 15 month-old when we're in Manhattan. It allows him to walk around, explore, and feel that autonomy that he craves without actually giving it to him. It keeps him from hugging strangers and running into traffic because he sees a rat and thinks it's a puppy.

Now imagine an adult putting a leash on their teenager. I'm sure many of you might like to but they could probably figure out the velcro. The alternative? The Parent-Child Apps. A digital leash on your child making sure they don't stray farther than you desire. If your child wonders outside of your preset radius you are notified.

Many new concepts are required here: storyboards, location services, alerts, and HTTP posts, patches, and get requests using a JSON API. I'm happy to say those acronyms used to be terrifying to me but now they're only slightly disconcerting and I know with more practice I'll become more and more comfortable. I was instructed to use NSURLConnection. Though deprecated, it's still important to understand this technique should I come across it in an existing app that I am working on. I'll learn about the current method, NSURLSession, in a future project.

Website with which the apps communicate.

Final layout of Parent App.

My favorite part of this project was working with the storyboards. I liked placing the elements on the pages and arranging each piece with the User Experience in mind. The location services weren't nearly as difficult as I thought they would be and I enjoyed running around the room to test that the latitude and longitude were changing. Alerts were even easier and it was fun to see the familiar blue bubble pop up on my own apps. With all pieces combined I had two, fully functioning apps, communicating with one another via a website. The methods learned were difficult but I could think of how they are used in countless apps on my own phone and knew that they were integral to my mobile developer tool set.

Varying opinions aside, there's no doubt there's a market for this app. On to the next project: LCD Clock.