Jonathan Chang

Honestly, I don’t remember too many things specifically; they’re more like little clips and snippets from the fog. I remember playing a lot of Magic: The Gathering with friends on the carpet at school. I remember Mr. Stephens playing Enya on his CD player while we wrote. I remember Mrs. D’unger taking some time after school to help me understand why these scary letters were invading our math problems. I remember a ridiculous line from a musical that went something like “I am responsible, able to respond,” which randomly haunts my dreams… Anyway, little things like that.

After Nysmith, I went to James Madison High School. During my freshman year, I had a surgery for an acoustic neuroma, a benign tumor in the brain on my hearing, balance, and facial movement nerves. It took me out of school for a month, forced me to re-learn how to walk, and gave me crippling headaches from too much physical activity. As such, I wasn’t up to playing any sports during high school or even most of college, so I ended up playing a lot of video games and reading. Honestly, I was quite a nerd from the get-go anyway, but the surgery and headaches kept me from branching out in any athletic way for quite a while.

Once my headaches subsided about half-way through college, I started playing Frisbee, flag football (no contact, what with my head and all), volleyball, biking, and hiking. There were a few years where I stopped biking after an accident though, and my bike ended up chained and rusting outside my apartment building. I took a sharp turn in the rain and slid on the concrete, shredding my chin to the bone and chipping two molars. I remember biking back to a friend’s apartment with chips of my teeth in hand so that they could drive me to the ER. But eventually I overcame that fear and started biking again! Just not in the rain.

Now that all my friends from college live in different states, we’ve started gathering together in the summers to go on backpacking trips. Last year, we went to Iceland and hiked the Laugavegur Trail over four days — an incredibly diverse scenery of desolate obsidian fields, massive waterfalls, river crossings, idyllic valleys, glaciers, dust fields, and lush forests. This past summer, we hiked the Northern Rim of Yosemite over four days — we walked up on top of El Capitan, crossed through a bunch of marshes, stopped at Eagle’s Peak and Yosemite Falls, and finally descended 3000 feet into the valley without any water because, of course, our water pump broke the night before the last day. We’re thinking something in Alaska or Canada maybe for our next trip.

During and since my high school years, I’ve also been heavily involved in my home church and college Christian fellowship through playing in the praise band, serving as a treasurer, and leading a Bible study group. I’ve also gone on a few short-term mission trips with my church during my high school years, helping with construction, playing with kids at orphanages, teaching English, etc.

In college, I was fortunate to come in already knowing that I wanted to take one of three paths: pre-med with a major in psychology with the hopes of becoming a psychiatrist, computer science engineering, or secondary school education. It took a week of biology to decide pre-med wasn’t for me, and I switched out. I also decided without taking any computer science classes that while I loved programming for fun, it also had the tendency to raise my blood pressure a little too much when that one missing semicolon breaks hundreds of lines of code. And so I gave education school a try, and every day in the classroom reminds me that it was the right choice.

When I was a fourth year at UVA, I met my soon-to-be wife. I stayed in Charlottesville and taught at Albemarle High School while she finished her undergraduate studies, and then I moved back to the Northern Virginia area to work at Flint Hill School when she started medical school at Georgetown University. We’ve been dating now for six years, and we’re finally set to be married in May!

To be honest, I haven’t taken too many official internships or jobs. Instead I spend my summers working on my own personal projects. For a few summers I did some freelance programming work, a few jobs for the psychology department at UVA, a few websites, small jobs like that. After college and before my first teaching job at Albemarle High School, I spent the whole summer taking summer classes for my special education endorsement because I added the endorsement at the very last minute. I’ve spent the last few summers working on adding a physics endorsement to my teaching license and participating in a three-week physics modeling workshop.

At Flint Hill, I teach 9th and 10th grade English, and this year I started teaching 9th grade physics. For a few years, I was putting my special education endorsement to use in the Learning Center Study Sessions, coaching students on improving their workflow and developing study habits that worked for them. I also do the occasional programming job, mostly using Google Scripts, to help out various people in the building. I also refill the pot of coffee when it’s empty because it’s the right thing to do.

During my Nysmith years (all of K-8), I was pretty shy, and I mean painfully and awkwardly so. I didn’t really come out of my shell fully until my college years, but I do think that the Nysmith environment sowed the seeds pretty early on. I felt comfortable enough making a few small, meaningful risks back then, and my confidence compounded upon itself over time.

As an adult, I feel that one of my greatest strengths is being an inquiry-based thinker. I ponder and wonder constantly, and that leads me to a lot of interesting and weird connections, some of which are just silly and ridiculous, but others end up being surprisingly inventive and innovative. This inquiring mindset is actually encouraged at Nysmith and sadly squelched in many other programs, educational or otherwise.

My advice would apply not only to life as a Nysmith student but as a human being: don’t be afraid to try new things. My fear of failure kept me from attempting so many things that I would have otherwise found great joy and satisfaction in earlier in life.