MIT Alumnus Finally Finds Fulfillment in Teaching

“Long story short: you're awesome, and deserve more recognition than you'll ever get.”

With those concluding words, Eli Gray, an MIT junior, nominated a favorite high school teacher, Yong Joo '95, to receive a 2013 MIT Inspirational Teaching Award. Joo was one of 29 educators to receive the award, which is granted at regional club ceremonies across the country each spring.

Joo is a chemistry and computer science teacher at Alameda High School in northern California. How did a mechanical engineering and chemistry major become a teacher? After working for seven years in telecommunications and IT, Joo felt unfulfilled. “I was warned that teaching is a profession with unique frustrations,” he says. “But I saw in it the possibility of making the world a better place one student at a time.”

Joo says his pedagogy is as ordinary as it is admirable: in teaching over 1,000 students, one at a time, since he began, Joo wins students over by connecting personally. He talks with them at lunch, attends their games, and keeps his classroom open late into the afternoon for extra help or hanging out.

In his nomination of Joo, Eli Gray also wrote:

[Joo] gave positive feedback to my independent programming projects that I did in his room after school, where many people hung out, talking, working, and asking questions while he was working away at a big stack of papers…because he was a completely likable and kind person, students respected him… an interesting and hardworking man.

“If they know that I care and have some respect for this relationship, the discipline is easier and the teaching is easier,” says Joo. “It’s a kind of credibility that you earn.”

At MIT, he witnessed another key to great teaching—Professor Dan Kemp’s zealous affection for organic chemistry in 5.12. Joo learned that such passion for a subject is quickly contagious.

“Before teaching, nothing really did it for me. This is the first thing I’ve tried that I think I can do for a long time,” he says.