Tsang has been a teacher at MHS for five years, for Calculus AB and Math II, but her teaching career goes further back, she said. She taught at Thomas Russell Middle School for two and a half years prior to coming to MHS. Before moving to the United States, she taught computer science and math at Chang Ming Thien College in Hong Kong for three years.
On top of her regular teaching hours, Tsang offers tutoring sessions in her classroom after school. Despite not getting paid for the extra time she stays after school, she provides an abundance of resources, such as SAT prep and ramen cup noodles, for students that come in for tutoring or just to do homework. According to Tsang, pay doesn’t matter to her. The moment she switched from engineering to teaching, she had already gotten a 60% pay cut, she said.
“My community was not very rich, so we could not afford any private tutoring,” Tsang said. “But my precalculus teacher actually gave a lot of help to his students. He helped us get an A on the public exam. He gave me the impression that some students will need help, and that’s okay. If he’s willing to sacrifice his hours to tutor and answer our questions, so should I.”
Tsang has been a teacher at MHS for three years, for Calculus AB and Math II, but her teaching career goes further back, she said. She taught at Thomas Russell Middle School for seven and a half years prior to coming to MHS. Before moving to the United States., she taught computer science and math at Chang Ming Thien College in Hong Kong for three years.
The transition from Hong Kong to America had its obstacles, according to Tsang. “My husband needed to come to the US first for his Ph.D.,” Tsang said.. “At that time, I was still teaching in Hong Kong High School, so we needed to keep a three-year long-distance relationship. But I eventually got a job as a software engineer in the Bay Area and was able to move to the U.S.”
She switched careers from a software engineer to a teacher after she and her husband decided they were financially stable, Tsang said. Although she enjoyed the problem-solving aspect of coding, she thought it was too repetitive and wanted to do something she would not regret for the second half of her life, she said.
“What I enjoy most about teaching is when I look into the student’s eyes, I can see that they are thinking with me,” Tsang said. “When I ask them a question, I can see how they analyze the problem. And then you see their eyes sparkle when they finally get something right, … but what brings me joy the most is when students from 20 or 30 years ago come back to me and say, ‘Mrs. Tsang, you impacted my life.’”
Tsang said she believes that our lives are not within our control. Her life has been a rollercoaster full of ups and downs ever since her second child passed away when he was four months old, Tsang said. Despite the initial devastation, she was able to find peace through Christianity; although he is gone, she knows where he is, she said.
“When I have to face a hardship, I have a mindset and tell myself, ‘Okay, this is the moment or the time period that you have to learn something from your hardship,’” Tsang said. “So I feel like every time I have hardship in my life, it actually gives me the opportunity for me to grow and for me to be a stronger person, … or as I like to put it, ‘No pain, no gain.’”