The Student Becomes The Teacher

I wanted my very first blog post to be an homage to my past, and to the many teachers and mentors who have helped shape who I am today. This is going to be a short one, but a necessary one.

My K-12 Experience

Many of my high school friends will tell you I slept in almost every one of my classes junior and senior year. I wasn’t necessarily a bad student — I just wasn’t an engaged one. But even half-asleep, I was absorbing more than I realized. The teachers around me were doing real work, and it landed, even when it didn’t look like it.

Kudos to my music teachers throughout my K-12 public school education: Mr. Williams in elementary school, who made music feel exciting and like something that belonged to everyone. Mr. Dinardis, my orchestra director in middle school. And in high school, Mr. Black and Mr. Buffaloe, who kept me playing and allowed me to step into leadership roles.

Kudos to my private lesson teachers: Ms. Ray and Mr. Chaisson on piano, and Mrs. Stanley on violin. There were many weeks I neglected to practice, and as a teacher now, I cringe looking back at all of the lost opportunities. The patience required to teach a kid one-on-one, week after week, when he doesn’t practice — I didn’t appreciate it then. I do now.

I’ve had many other incredible teachers throughout my public school years. They deserve their own posts, and those are coming.

What I’m Building

I’m a high school computer science and cybersecurity teacher in Texas now. Somewhere along the way, the kid who slept through class became the one standing at the front of it.

If you’re a teacher, you know the drill. You pour hours into building your course on a learning management system — your lessons, your resources, your assessments, all organized just the way you want. Then your district switches platforms, and you’re either migrating everything or starting from scratch. Switch school districts and it happens again — pull everything off the old LMS, reupload it to the new one, re-link everything, re-format what broke in translation. And that’s just the platform side. On top of that, so many of the tools and resources teachers rely on require you to create yet another account, or lock the good stuff behind a subscription that renews year after year. Multiply that across a career and it wears on you.

I’ll have a lot more to say about all of that in a future post. But that frustration is a big part of why this site exists.

charlesdwang.com is where I’ll be sharing free resources, writing about education, and documenting what I’m learning along the way. I also have a YouTube channel if you appreciate long-form videos. Always free, no account ever required.

But I wanted to start here — with the people who made all of this possible. Thank you.