So what the hell is The Professional Student?

I’ll start off with who I am.

I am part of the IT team at Yokohama International School. All in spite of graduating the University of Washington with a major in Economics and minor in Japan Studies.

But I’ve always been a gear head and technobabble enabled human, so you could say my hobby is my job.

Despite not being a teacher, I advise Yearbook and work with a number of other groups that typically involves students and staff alike. I also extend my photography hobby by taking bunches of photos and sticking them on my gallery or get them used prominently on the school’s website.

All this is thanks to the fact that our school’s IT backbone is based on Apple products. Since I’ve done an awesome job of setting up my systems, nothing ever breaks (yeah, right). Occasionally, my job feels like being the world’s oldest high school student with the fringe benefit of having a salary, a health plan, a retirement plan, and no homework. Though it never works out that way since someone always breaks something.

Anyways, I digress.

So why The Professional Student?

To say it simply, I’ve been a student for the last 24 years.

Deeper in I can’t deny the fact that I work at a school and do all the things that constitute a job and an instructor. But at the end of the day, I’m not a teacher.

And students notice this. I have authority, but I do not receive the neither the respect nor the disdain of a teacher.

I remain at the same level as a person who simply has a desk in a school. And that’s pretty much the same as a student.

In this blog, I hope to reflect upon my daily (or some other facsimile of a short period of time) goings and work at YIS. I’ve learned a lot about my own growth through my interactions with students and my coworkers. And I hope to be able to communicate my own progress as a human being, educator and occasional moron.