INTERVIEW WITH
Mr. HOWARD CHANG
What is your most cherished JCL memory?
The end of my last National convention as a student. I believe it was Tennessee in 1994. My best friend and my other best friend, a future VJCL president, were driving back from Tennessee to Virginia. This was at a time before* there was a strict ban on students traveling to and from convention and if it wasn’t, sorry for breaking the rules.But anyway, we were making the trip in my friend’s crappy Chevy convertible and had just packed our bags. The VJCL buses had already loaded up and they were starting to pull off. As they were pulling off, I remember waving to them. Everyone was waving back at me; I didn’t necessarily know everyone on the bus, but I was friends with a lot of them. It was just so emotional because it felt like I was saying goodbye to my Latin career as I was waving goodbye to the actual members of the organization. It was powerful. The epilogue to that was, when we were on the highway, we caught up to the bus. When we caught up with them, we started to do our cheers from the convertible and they did them back from the bus. It was our very own spirit competition on the highway. It was a great moment and I still think very fondly of that memory. I was on the outside; I had already “graduated” from the VJCL. I could literally see it in my rearview mirror and it looked beautiful. Just as it does now as I’m making a transition in my career.
What was the impetus for your Latin teaching career?
Ever since my early JCL days, I had harbored the fantasy of teaching. I found through working with my friends, both in Certamen and in class situations, that I enjoyed trying to motivate them and explain things to them and tutoring them. As a senior, there was a local Certamen in the Richmond area and it wasn’t attended by many of the competitive schools. I grew up in Chesterfield county and my school was the only really competitive Certamen school at the time, this was Thomas Dale High School. Most of the other competitive schools were very concentrated in the northern Virginia area. So I went to the Certamen as a moderator. I was a senior moderating Certamen and it was a really great experience. All of these experiences, in addition to running Certamen at my school, gave me idea that maybe this was for me. However, like a lot of people I know, there was a lot of parental pressure to do or not do certain things. So when I got to college, I majored in classics, which lines up well with teaching Latin. At that point I had already resolved or resigned myself as going to Law school. While I wasn’t going to do medical school and become a doctor the way my family wished, law was going to be acceptable to them in other ways. So during Law school, I majored in Classics. Towards the end of my undergraduate years, a good teacher friend of mine reached out to me to consider interviewing for a dual English/Latin position at their particular school. It was a private school in Virginia and at the time it would have been a dream because I was also an English major and I knew the people and would have really liked the experience. However, at the time I still wanted to do something that would marginally satisfy my family. After that, I made the decision not to fully become a lawyer. I practiced, I passed the bar and I went straight into management consulting. It was at this time that I realized I needed to be somewhere where I could put passion into my work. It was my first real dose of the working world that really catapulted me into my decision to become a teacher.
*Editor's note: While no conclusive evidence can be found as to whether or not this was allowed, we're going to let this one slide, for now.