Teachers on Sabbatical: Angie Leung

I love learning from and getting to know the twenty or so teachers in the sabbatical program at CSI. I have asked them to share their writing with me so I can post on this blog.

Here is an entry by Angie Leung who has been teaching ESL in District 20, Brooklyn for the past 16 years. 

F. Scott Fitzgerald has said, “It’s never too late or, in my case, too early to be whoever you want to be.  I hope you live a life you’re proud of.  If you find that you’re not, I hope you have the strength to start all over again.”

Indeed, I hope I have the strength to redefine myself.  I have gotten too used to being a teacher, a wife and mother.  I need to explore other parts of my identity.  I have not been a good friend or daughter by not reaching out to friends and my mother often enough.  I have not been a student for far too long.  That is why I am on this sabbatical, finding my student mindset as sailors find “their sea legs.”  

I hope to gain a different perspective by being in the classroom as a student this year.  If I can actually do one thing for the rest of my life, I would love to stay a student.  There’s too much to learn.  Confucius said, “To know what you know and what you do not know, that is true knowledge; Real knowledge is to know the extent of one's ignorance.”  I still feel quite ignorant and therefore wish to study much more.

I would like to learn more about writing children’s books and dream about becoming a writer someday.  I feel that there are never enough books to encourage boys to read more, especially since my son always has trouble finding books to read because he is a picky reader but not a picky eater.  I think boys would benefit from reading more books about humorous characters like Junie B. Jones.  There’s an Asian author named Lenore Look who wrote the “Ruby Lu,” and “Alvin Ho” series.  We read those when my son was in elementary school.  My son is now in his first year of high school, and I regret to say that he has stopped reading for pleasure ever since middle school.  He grew up with bedtime stories from Eric Carle and Dr. Seuss.

I would also like to explore my Chinese heritage more; visiting Hong Kong with a stopover in Shanghai last year really got me interested in finding a summer teaching job as an excuse to stay and explore China more.  

With all the culturally responsive classroom talk taking place at the moment, I still feel we don’t see enough Asian American authors being included.  There was one year of the ELA test for middle school where they had an excerpt from Millicent Min, Girl Genius by Lisa Yee.  That was one time of the 16 years of my teaching where an Asian American author has been included in literary texts in school.  That is one area where I would like to see an improvement in as en educator.  Some Asian authors I admire are Amy Tan, Maxine Hong Kingston, and Laurence Yep.There is all this talk about including the minority in this city and country.  The irony of it is that Chinese, and Asians in general, are rarely represented as minority.  In fact, they are reversely discriminated against when it comes to accepting minority into prestigious colleges.  It is  a known trend where even in pop culture - the movie “Bad Moms” has the young overachieving daughter say, “Mom, they are even turning away Asians at the Ivy League colleges.” In order to reverse these stereotypes, teachers need to include and represent Asian characters in the classroom.  Of course, it wouldn’t hurt for the teachers to become authors themselves, so I would like to start that endeavor during my sabbatical this year.