If I Return to Teaching

Let me set this straight: I don't want to. From my time at Elizabeth Public Schools and then to Roselle Borough Public Schools--in my short 6-year-career of teaching--I've seen enough of inner-city school districts to realize that I do not want to be in it. It is rife with so many problems, and I was …

Planning the Dream Home: Study

My wife and I are starting to make moves toward buying a home. While, yes, there's a lot of foundational things we need to do like getting pre-approved for a mortgage, researching neighborhoods and the market, one thing that I want to spend some more time on is the more shallow imagining of what our …

Dream Home Series – 1: Key Themes

My wife and I are hitting that wonderful moment in our lives where we're setting our goals to the next milestone: A (Dream) House We're starting the process now--getting our finances in check, calculating what range we'd want our home price to be within (so we're not shackled to a mortgage), getting pre-approved for a …

Transitioning

Right before spring break of this year, I had to come to terms with two things: I was horrible at this job Teaching was eating me alive. First off, I sucked at Teaching I mean this as honestly as I can: I was bad at my job. To excel at teaching, you needed to be …

Social Media and My Life

Social Media Takeover I remember the day I got Myspace. I got caught up in all the hype of it. I didn't like to go too hard and mess around with the HTML coding (I wonder how many people found out that they had a knack for programming from those Myspace days), but I obsessed over …

Parenting Gut Check

Lessons by Teddy Do you see the resemblance? On August 4th, one of the greatest life events in my life happened: Theodore Tang. It's been almost 10 months since that day, and I haven't had a moment to recollect until this past weekend, when we went to Arizona for my sister-in-law's Medical School graduation (congratulations, …

Living With Friends

Back in 2006, when I was only 18, I was surrounded by some newfound friends and we had all fallen in love with each other's company. We braved this new world of a state university and took on all of its challenges and rewards together. We were a mixed cast, with people varying in ambitions, …

I Quit Teaching

  On March 22nd, 2018, I resigned.   I had reached a breaking point in my career. I was still coping over the heart-wrenching firing from my time at Halsey. Why I had not read the writing on the wall after the joke-of-an-administrator even went so far as to write me an uncharacteristically scathing observation …

Going to Post More Often

Many things have happened in the past few months--most importantly a new job--and so I've found myself with a lot of guilt-free free time (I'll explain that in a future post). I've decided now that I'm going to try to write something every week--posting at least something every Tuesday. Doesn't matter what, but I have …

Fun Idea Series (#1) Meal Prep with Friends

I love to cook. It's a passion of mine that I share with my wife. Together when we were living in Columbus, Ohio; Lily and I would spend a lot of our time developing this hobby (which, at the time, was more out of necessity because I could not bear to spend another week finding sustenance …