I found my way into teaching as almost an afterthought, and part way into my first year realized it was the demanding, world-changing event that I needed to center my life around. In the summer of 2000, I started teaching five and a half days a week at a middle school and one day at an elementary school in Japan under the Japanese Exchange and Teaching Program (JET) simply because I wanted to give something back after a life-altering study abroad experience. I was placed in Namino, Japan—a tiny town with a single middle school and elementary school, tons of land and few people.

At the schools, I was fortunate to have several master teachers eager to critique and nurture me as a new teacher. They taught me many of the principles that guide my teaching today, “The second you think that you are smarter than a room full of kids, you are not going to be able to help them”; “Don't judge yourself on the 'best' student in the class—how are you doing with the kids who in general don't like school”; “If you want to be the best teacher in the world, pursue the toughest teaching environment and don't make excuses”; and most importantly, “Before the students lose interest in your instruction, ask them what they are passionate about and work with that—their learning belongs to them. With only 54 students in the middle school, I was able to see every student everyday (five or six days each week) and apologize directly when I made mistakes. By the second year, I had discovered that I loved the constant growth and the impossible complexity of teaching.

I have taught Japanese language for three years at Julian High School in Chicago, and in many ways, it is as imperfect of an education environment that one can find. We have lost a dozen students to community violence in my short tenure at the school, and the significant responses have been strictly reactive. However, the harshness of the environment has taught me to listen to my students—first for survival and now because it's the best possible teaching practice. They have led service learning trips to New Orleans each year, presented at national conferences in Houston, founded Chicago Youth Initiating Change (CYIC) a city-wide social justice organization that hosts a 500 participant student-led conference each year, taught the incoming freshman on how to center their education around community and school improvement through Summer Bridge and service learning programs, helped throw sister city events in conjunction with the Osaka City Office, built partnerships with another two dozen community organizations and countless schools and rebuilt the structures of our own school to empower students rather than merely house them. With no resources to float these programs, the students have built partnerships and written their own grants to gather their own resources.