In the 34 years Roger Wong has taught in Renton School District, the most embarrassing moment he experienced was when a student with a boyish appearance came up to Wong and asked to sign up for the girls soft ball team.

“You can’t sign up for girls softball,” Wong said, thinking the student was trying to pull a prank on him.

“Why not?” the student asked.

“Because you’re a boy.”

“What? I’m a girl.”

Wong turned red. For the entire school year, he assumed the student was a male and he had learned the truth the hard way. Ever since then, he’s learned that the easiest way to salvage awkward situations with students was to laugh, say something to the affect of “Oh, I knew that,” and then quickly change the subject.

This isn’t the only story Wong has up his sleeve. As a social studies and language arts teacher at Hazen High School from 1972 to 1992, then Nelsen Middle School from 1992 to 2013, Wong collected enough of stories that would fill an entire book.

So that’s exactly what he did.

Last year, Wong published “Sit Down and Shut Up,” a book of essays about his over 30 years of teaching high school and middle school students.

“I always thought there were some funny stuff that happens to teachers in education and in schools,” he said. “I believe they are common things that most teachers would have similar experiences. It seemed like schools in the last 15 years have gotten so serious. There weren’t too many things coming out in education and teaching that were considered funny and light-hearted.”

Wong said that the book largely contains stories about “embarrassing or stupid stuff I’ve done as a teacher.”

Even though Wong considers himself lucky to have found an enjoyable career, he didn’t always have his hopes set on the teaching pathway.

“I didn’t even know or want to be a teacher for a long time till I got to the end of junior year of college,” he said. “I was majoring in sociology. I started think what I was going to do with that. Not much I realized… then I thought, ‘I could be a social studies teacher.’ So I took couple of extra classes, that’s how I ended up doing it.”

Right out of college, Wong found himself in the thick of the high school jungle.

“I almost quit my first year, because it was so bad for me,” he said. “The students didn’t seem to cooperate. It was partly me because as a new teacher, I didn’t know how to get them going and motivate them like the other, more experienced teacher. But I hung on and I’m glad I did.”

He quickly found out that teaching was like parenting — you didn’t have a manual for it and you had to learn as you go. Every child is different so it was important to adopt a ” live and learn” mindset quickly, he said.

It wasn’t until Wong was able to teach the subjects he loved that he knew education was what he was made for.

“It was either my second or third year, and the principal came to me asked me if I wanted to teach psychology and sociology to mostly juniors and seniors. And I said yes! That was truly the most enjoyable classes I ever taught. And I said, ‘This! This is good.'”

He said that teaching soon became enjoyable and that he valued making a difference in the lives of his students.

As Wong was gearing up for retirement after 34 years teaching, he was drawn into the idea of penning down a comedic chronicle of his experience. He started working on his manuscript right after retirement and finished it a year and a half after he started.

“[The book] will resonate better with teachers because they will understand first hand the situations,” he said. “I try to make it so non-teachers will understand too by spending time explaining things.”