Three schools in 4 years would make most people hate school. This was the story for newcomer English teacher Ms. Jordan Lee, who had a particularly difficult time in high school, as she transitioned to multiple high schools, including moving to a different state for a year, as well as having many teachers who she felt were uninspiring.
“All the moving around made me hate high school, which made me not have a consistent social life and it was hard to keep friends,’’ said Ms. Lee, then adding, “It was hard finding comfort at a school and there were teachers that didn’t seem like they liked students and were mean.”
Ms. Lee first started high school in San Diego, but moved to New Mexico during her sophomore year. While she was only there for 1 year, it was not a good experience, specifically because she was the only Korean at her school which made her feel like she didn’t fit in,
Ms. Lee also didn’t enjoy her time in New Mexico because she went to a small school in Albuquerque where there wasn’t much to do, and the culture was different from San Diego with its food and architecture. She also felt very different from other people and missed having access to Asian foods. Similarly, her mom hated New Mexico for the same reasons and they moved back to San Diego.
When she moved back to San Diego, Ms. Lee was placed at a different high school than her freshman year. It was a bigger school than the previous ones. No one knew that she was new to the school and it was hard for her to fit in. She also didn’t feel like the teachers weren’t passionate about teaching.
Yet Ms. Lee was able to persevere and graduate high school, where she then headed to get her undergraduate at Cal Poly SLO (San Luis Obispo). She decided to commit to Cal Poly Slo because she wanted to step out of her comfort zone and challenge herself. She felt that if she went somewhere closer to her home like UC San Diego, she wouldn’t have gotten any new experiences.
After graduating at Cal Poly, she then moved up to UC Berkeley and received her teaching credentials. What made her enjoy her experience was that her professor at Berkeley was really passionate about teaching and influenced her to become one.
Ms. Lee was motivated to become a high school teacher in order to show students that there are teachers in high school who care about their students. Ms. Lee said, “I ended up becoming a teacher because one of my professors in college was very inspiring and showed me how much of a difference there is between teachers who enjoy their jobs and ones that hate it.”
Starting her teaching career at Galileo, Ms Lee was thrown for a loop as she didn’t know she was going to teach newcomers English until a week before school started. She felt very stressed about this but she received assistance from her mom, a 4th grade reading comprehension teacher, who’s given Ms. Lee a number of resources.
