Hello everybody!
Translate to your language by selecting from the box~:
USA250 Journal Project
Personal Chronicle: July 4, 2025 – July 5, 2026
A gift for reflection. A record of now. A story for what’s next.
📓 David Roth – : “Who am I?”
Begin with truth—even if it changes.
I’m David Saul Roth. Husband. Father. Public school teacher. Reader. Listener. Occasional overthinker.
I’m the man who still believes literature can save us—or at least remind us who we are when the noise gets too loud. I’ve spent decades in a classroom filled with chipped desks and underfunded hope, reading Beloved and 1984 out loud to teenagers who don’t yet know they’ll remember it forever.
I’m married to a woman who sees through excuses and loves through action. I’m raising two sons who are nothing alike—and both, somehow, reflections of me.
I’m Jewish, though not as observant as my parents hoped. I keep the traditions that make sense. Discard the ones that don’t. I whisper blessings out of habit more than belief, but they still feel like home.
I’m someone who writes in the margins. Who remembers the exact sentence that changed his mind. Who doesn’t always say what he feels until it’s late and everyone else has gone to sleep.
I’m not perfect. Not even close. But I try to be present. To do less harm. To raise my boys with more listening than lecturing. To stay in a world that too often pushes good men out.
Who am I?
A man trying to live like the stories he assigns matter.
A man who knows they do.
📓 David Roth – “How did I get here?”
Tell it like you’d want it remembered.
I got here by choosing words over noise. Purpose over comfort. Public school over easier paths.
I was raised outside Allentown. Small town. Big silences. My mother taught piano, my father sold insurance. We weren’t religious, but we lit candles on Hanukkah and passed down the stories anyway—about great-uncles who escaped, about what it meant to be Jewish even when it was safer not to say so.
Books were my first rebellion. I read everything—poetry, banned novels, essays that made me angry before I even knew why. I wasn’t athletic. I wasn’t cool. I was the kid in the back of class highlighting Baldwin and pretending I didn’t care what people thought.
I studied English because it felt like survival. I became a teacher because I couldn’t imagine hoarding that clarity. I thought: If I can help one kid feel less alone in their mind, that’s enough.
Then came Rebecca. She was all precision and calm. Science where I was story. She didn’t laugh easily—but when she did, it mattered. We built a life slowly, with shared intention.
We had Eli first—brilliant, brittle, brave. Then Ari—sunlight and storm in a soccer jersey. I’ve taught whole classrooms for years, but raising my sons is the most complex curriculum I’ve ever faced.
I got here through lesson plans and late-night dishes, through arguments about bedtime and policy, through Shabbat candles and emergency grocery runs. Through grief and growth and holding my wife’s hand under the table when the news got too heavy.
Life has taught me that the world doesn’t care how eloquently you speak—only how consistently you show up. So I show up. In the classroom. In the kitchen. In the quiet.
I got here because I believed in stories. And I stayed because I believe in people.
Especially the ones I come home to.
Family, Friends & Associates
Rebecca Roth – Wife
Eli Roth – Son.
Ari Roth – Son.
Miriam – Mother.
