Ms. In Sim, her literature, and her legendary tea parties are a cornerstone of the Woodgrove High School experience. And while most know her as the inhabitant of classroom 409, many do not know the story of her life before she was a teacher and how she came to Woodgrove.
For the first seven years of her life, Sim grew up in Seoul, South Korea with her parents and four siblings. For her first grade year, Sim’s alleged “crazy Asian parents” sent her to a South Korean cram school before their move to the United States that May. When her family arrived in Prince George’s County, Maryland, a young Sim looked for direction in her life. While most kids want to be doctors and astronauts, “I didn’t know what I wanted to be, so I just followed my two older sisters,” Sim reflected.
Since Sim’s older sister went to college, Sim felt obligated to go as well. Living in Maryland, the University of Maryland seemed the obvious choice. To try and ensure her acceptance, Sim used the common strategy of extracurricular stacking by joining her school newspaper and managing the volleyball team. Once she was accepted and arrived in College Park, Sim didn’t know what she wanted to study and found that following her sisters’ leads could only get her so far. In her third year, Sim realized, “Oh, like I really need a major, you know, like, so I got the most number of class credits in English, okay,” and therefore decided to be an English major, kickstarting her journey to become an English teacher.
Fresh out of college, Sim took a brief job as a receptionist for Lockheed Martin before applying to a prestigious English teaching program based in Japan. After getting rejected once, Sim said, “No. I have an English and Literature degree. So I’m going to apply again.” Against all odds, Sim somehow got the job by sending the same application twice. In Osaka, Japan, Sim taught English and literature to her students at a school who “were so respectful of all teachers’ authority.” After her adventures in Osaka came to an end, Sim enjoyed teaching so much that she went back to College Park to get a second bachelor’s degree to be able to teach in The States. She afforded this through a combination of careful spending and earnings as an RA.
Armed with degrees and ready to teach English and Literature to high schoolers, Sim took a job as a temporary teacher at a Maryland school and conducted a field trip to Yokohama, Japan. Prior to the field trip, Sim attended a job fair for Loudoun County teachers, as the area was rapidly growing. Sim was living in Maryland and applied for only Eastern Loudoun schools, but while she was in Japan, received an email from the principal of Loudoun Valley High School extending an offer to teach 1o honors and AP Literature. The offer was too good to pass up, so Sim took the job at Loudoun Valley, where she met her now good friend, Ms. Diana Shea. They met because their rooms were across from each other and became close because, “We also both had common planning periods at Valley and there was only one teacher’s lounge so we would be in there at the same time,” explained Shea. Since then, the duo has taken students to Ireland, Budapest, and Poland. When Woodgrove opened several years later, the two transferred over together.
While Sim has accomplished much as a teacher, she loves to visit the settings of the books she teaches but is still “waiting for Kabul, Afghanistan to settle down to visit Amir’s home,” remarked Sim, referring to the main character of The Kite Runner, a book her AP Lit students read every year. Even though Sim didn’t know what she wanted to do with her life for a while, she found the perfect fit. She is so good at her job that Shea believes, “If Sim would be reincarnated she would come back as an English teacher. She is just that passionate about her subject and about her students.”