Written by: Katie Chin and James Wang

Inspired by the volunteer contributions of his older brother and father, Lynbrook High School senior James Wang began volunteering at FCSN in 2018. Today, James leads the FCSN Computer Class Program, helping expand the program to over nine classes and 43 students. His impressive contributions led him to receive the title of FCSN’s Volunteer of the Year.

Passionate about sharing his love for programming languages such as Python, Java, HTML, and CSS, James cherishes moments of growth among his students and watches their proficiency in coding grow exponentially. The various computer classes James leads are motivated by his belief in the immense power of programming languages and the number of possibilities for students’ exploration they lead to.

James is encouraged by the many experiences of working with students and helping them understand difficult concepts. He adapts his teaching style to different students’ mentalities and abilities; he must explore a variety of ways to explain concepts to students, a challenge that drives him to become a better mentor. “Sometimes, students will be stuck on a certain topic and after trying almost ten different approaches to explaining a very difficult topic, they’ll finally understand it and that moment — it’s really something else,” James said.

Throughout his years of teaching at FCSN, James has fallen in love with the special needs family. He greatly values the opportunity to teach many students due to the program’s large size and admires all the hard-working people who make up FCSN. “What I really like about the program is the amount of dedicated people working in FCSN who share the same goal as me,” James said.

In his free time, James enjoys playing video games with friends and pursuing personal projects, such as creating Discord bots.

As the leader of the FCSN Computer Class program, James not only leads and teaches several classes, but also organizes student-teacher pairings, reviews the curriculum for all classes, and addresses parent emails. He looks forward to seeing the program grow even further in the future.

“Every time I teach these special needs students, they always pick up something new,” James said. “Seeing them learn new things and helping them improve their computer literacy motivates me to continue doing what I do.”