This is the backstory about what makes me tick. My family moved from Pennsauken, NJ, which was a nice middle-class community and school system where I was an above-average student, to Mt. Lebanon, PA.

My father was able to go to college due to WWII. After the war, he went back to working in an insurance company in Philadelphia, PA. A couple of years later, he got a promotion at the company's home office in Pittsburgh, PA. That meant that we had to move. He asked a real estate agent about the best school system in the area. The realtor said Mt. Lebanon.

The real estate agent was correct; Mt. Lebanon was the best school system in the Pittsburgh area. He didn’t mention that it was also the 19th-best school system in the entire country and the wealthiest community in Western Pennsylvania. I learned two things while at Mt. Lebanon: I was dumb and poor in a golden ghetto. I lived with that twofold curse of being dumb and poor while at Mt. Lebanon. When I went to college, I wanted to prove to myself that I was neither.

Louie Palmer taught a required 10-hour course that students could take in either their junior or senior years. Fortunately, I took it in my junior year. At the end of the second semester, Louie asked me to be his teaching assistant the following year. During my senior year, I taught several subsections each week and wrote and graded the midterms and finals of both semesters. I wasn’t quite as dumb as I felt while at Mt. Lebanon.

In the past quarter-century, I taught humanities classes at several colleges and universities. The classes ranged from history, art history, philosophy, and world religions. My favorite class was art history. However, my last class was an online world religions survey class, which happened to be Ti Ti’s first college class. Scroll down to Ti Ti’s section of my website to the last two essays that she wrote about the class and the final.

Aside from loving my family, dumb and poor still haunt me. My family is intelligent. However, they live in a developing country that has additional problems like several major coups. Once a coup is successful, the military rules the country with an abusive mindset toward the population.

Economically, the vast majority of people have very little in comparison to Americans. Name any major appliance that we have; my family and most people in Myanmar don’t own. My family doesn’t have a refrigerator, freezer, oven, washer and dryer, dishwasher, microwave, or HVAC. They do have several hot plates with propane cylinders. They also have electricity along with water, but it isn’t drinkable.

The issue of being poor for me has come full circle. Between having a mortgage and a home equity loan, in addition to the wire transfers to my family and extended family of nine, I still have far more than my family and most people in Myanmar.