Pate Thomas

My name is Pate Thomas and I currently teach US History at Southwest Career and Technical Academy in Las Vegas, NV. When I first started at the Univeristy of Nevada Las Vegas I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life, the one thing that I thought I knew was that I didn’t want to be a teacher. My parents, grandmother, and great grandparents were all teachers and although my sister and I never went without we were nowhere near “rich”. After doing a few different part-time jobs and trying out three different majors, my mother suggested that I explore becoming a teacher. At this point in my college career with a bunch of history and political science credits which I still had no idea of what I wanted to do I finally agreed. After taking my first education class, I was instantly interested in the education field. Looking back it should have made sense, I grew up in schools my entire life. In elementary my grandparents would take us to school and after I would go with my parents to the different sporting activities that my parents coached in various Las Vegas high schools.

Soon after I had enough credits I became a substitute teacher in the Clark County School District. After subbing for a few weeks, I realized that choosing a career is not about how much money you make, rather how much you enjoy what you do. My senior year of college, I could not substitute due to student teaching so I started to apply to different jobs. After giving up hope and working on accepting a diet of Ramen Noodles and water I received a call from Apple about an application that I filled out for their college program. After a phone interview, I was offered a job working as an AppleCare Advisor in the iOS department.

Working for Apple was an amazing experience. Not only was it very educational, everyone that I worked with was very supportive and friendly. The training process was difficult yet rewarding and enabled me to get various ideas on how to implement technology in education.

I graduated from college in the middle of the school of the school year so I knew it was going to be difficult to get a job, so I started a long term sub job at a low achieving High School. After a few months, I received a call from Southwest CTA for a job interview because the previous US History teacher had moved in the middle of the year. Once again I had lucked out and started working at Southwest in February. My first week on the job I was introduced to