About

“Between stimulus and response, there is a space. In that space lies our freedom and our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our happiness.”  Viktor Frankl

I have been a middle school math teacher for the past twenty years, with a focus on teaching the accelerated students. As a gifted student myself who internalized the message from a 7th grade math teacher that I “just couldn’t do math,” I vowed to show ALL students that they can not only do – but also love – math.

It’s been a successful career by all metrics, but it is time for a change. It time to grow. It is time to take a leap of faith. It is time to go back to being a student myself in order to transition into something new – something more cognitively demanding and less emotionally demanding than teaching. And after much consideration and weighing of interests and skills, that something is data science.

On January 2, 2020, I coded my first ever “Hello World.” Since that time, I have been winding down my time in the classroom (with an exit date set to May 2021) and studying coding and the relevant math around the edges (edges that became quite narrow with the demands of teaching in the time of Covid).

I am enrolled in Flatiron’s full-time Online Data Science program beginning this June. This blog will explore the emotions that come with leaving teaching, the process of transitioning into a new career and the excitement (and struggles!) of learning to code and speak data. Along the way, I’ll share my lessons, my fails, my wins and hopefully a little encouragement for those of you on a similar path.

I wasn’t born to “Just Teach.”

I was born to inspire others

To change people

And to never give up –

Even when faced with challenges that seem impossible.

-Raj Kumar

When I’m not mathing or coding, I can often be found exercising, spending time with my husband and two pit bulls or working on my blog Lessons From the End of a Marriage and associated YouTube channel.

Lisa Arends

February 15, 2021