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! :)