Favorite Teacher

When I arrived to the US on 9th grade, one of the many things that I saw different from the Mexican Middle School from where I came from, was that instead the teacher would walk from room to room,the students now walk from teacher to teacher (Which now reflecting, it is a better and more efficient system).  It was incredible how much you can tell from one teacher’s personality based on his or her room or lesson,  for example, Mrs. Hudler has a very colorful personality to my opinion because in her classrooms the three most dominant colors ( blue, green, and white) somehow illuminates the room in some sort of pastel color, and the magic is that no matter if we read a gory story as Macbeth, or the gloomy Beowulf, the colorfulness of her classroom doesn’t go away, and I always imagine that her classroom is some sort of metaphorical carrusel, or -if you understand my idea better with this comparison- the inside of a hippie combie (but instead of smoke, it smells to cinnamon). But dear reader, this page is not about Mrs. Hudler (ha! Got you!); Yes, Mrs. Hudler has been my favorite teacher in my senior year, but when she assigned me this page during the Ragnarok, she said “This page is about your favorite teacher of all your four years of High School”, and since Mrs. Hudler is only my favorite teacher of senior year, she doesn’t fall in this category (but I do feel admiration and appreciation for Mrs. Hudler, in fact I will right now look to the starred night and look for a group of stars that form a woman with a book, and call her the “ Mrs. Hudler’s Constellation”, like Zeus did with Chiron, Perseus and greek heroes’ mentor). I am going to talk about a teacher whose classroom is not as “hippe” as Mrs. Hudler’s, or is not as goofy as Mr. Kohlhase, or was not as popular as Mr. Laney (Radiology teacher who was popular because he was supercool), but rather to a teacher who retired when I started my senior year, but while he worked in Med High he used to put us often 2- hour videos from the eighties, and to be honest, I would sometimes fell asleep in his class, in fact, once I fell asleep for 15 minutes!

Dear Reader, I suppose you wonder “Well Alejandro, If you used to fell asleep in his class, then how could you have the face to write in this space that he was your favorite teacher?” Well, let me explain…

I had Mr. Wertz on both Freshmen and Junior Year. I had him for Biology 3B and Environmental Science 3A (I still remember the class periods). And he wasn’t a pretty much exciting class, like I said before, he used to put us most of the time Two-hour videos from the eighties with primitive visual effects, but somehow the learning sticked to my head, it was like those kinds of hypnotic sessions where you go in and came out without remembering nothing, but in my subconscious I felt that I did learned something, and by next class period and for the exams I remembered everything. So Mr. Wertz made me learn easily, without putting any effort, which is something cool because you can use your resources in another thing.

He didn’t talk too much, and most of the time he looked sad, and when I was in Environmental Science he used to play the paper of “the prophet of the Judgement Day”, but he had a pretty interesting life, for example, he was attended to a college that was near a nuclear plant in Pennsylvania and the plant had a nuclear meltdown (wikipedia “Three Mile Island accident”), then he taught in a South African elementary school during the Apartheid, he almost met Nelson Mandela, and he left that life of excitement in South Africa to come to the valley to teach High School kids. This example tells me that you don’t need to be loud to have an exciting life, but just to be focused.

Finally, during my freshmen year, I think he was one of the few people who believed the most in me. You see dear reader, he would help me with his class, and encouraged me to study, when I was discouraged by the other classes (but this only happened in my freshmen year, all the other years were different).

P.S. Have you noticed that there are not scratched out words in this entry?

Mr.Wertz