Did you know that Mr. Lasky wasn’t always a teacher? Before joining LAUSD and Taft Charter High School he worked in the film industry with a production company “Being at a production company allowed me to network with people at the studio and learn the inner-workings of the industry. I moved into an internship in Development. Development was where I knew I belonged. Development involves finding potential projects and working with writers to strengthen their scripts before shooting begins”  He went to school at CSUN prior to joining the workforce, and decided that an English degree would be the best fit for him, after college his work in film “allowed [him] to stretch [his] creative muscles and utilize story-sense without having the soul-draining experience that is the act of writing.”

When asked why he made the transition from the industry to education, he shared that he realized that [he] would “pay it forward” by getting into education myself. “I always appreciated the effect that one caring professor had upon my life; I hoped that I could do some good in the world by using my talents to have an influence upon future generations of youths. Maybe my small impact upon their education will cause one of the students I teach to discover a talent or love of writing that they didn’t know was inside them all along.”

While he has been in education for 4 years, this is his second year at Taft. “Taft is a good school. Teachers, administrators, counselors, and all the staff genuinely care about the students and believe in what they are doing. The school is big and, while the buildings are old, the campus is nice. I love that it is a diverse campus filled with a variety of voices. I think it’s a quality that is exceptionally important and it’s great that the students experience that environment as they grow into adulthood.”

Mr. Lasky is often found in his classroom after hours building curriculum, working on lessons, and finding the meaning in all of the madness. An interesting conundrum that he is currently pondering is students and technology. “The current crop of youths becoming young-adults now are the first to have grown up in a world where social media and internet-in-your-pocket and iPhones were already in place. You didn’t experience a time that existed pre-internet. As a world, we don’t know how that is going to shape the way in which you perceive and engage with the world. We don’t know how it will shape the world the future. We don’t know what impact, for good or for evil, it will have. That is exciting and fascinating….and terrifying.”

If you are lucky enough to find yourself in his class, expect verbose prose, lots of vests, and a healthy dose of technology. Look for his museum of literary artifacts, it is not one to miss.