SAT & AP Teacher

Gerardo Tejada

Humanities or Science/Math? Yes. Non-fiction or fiction? Yes. Reading glasses or microscope? Yes. That I needn’t be one or the other, a significant discovery of my youth, opened me up to innumerable possibilities. Because growing up, my prospects didn’t seem so great.

By seven, my ears were full-grown. By thirteen, my smile was a moshpit of teeth. By nineteen, I almost weighed 45kg. I was shy. Excessively anxious. Trying to make myself invisible only worked on the ladies. Bullies remained eagle-eyed and ravenous. My perspective, much like the thickness of my glasses, screamed “myopic”.

Letters and numbers changed not my body but my capacity to perceive myself, giving me control over how I project myself. I found I could influence how others perceived me even when powerless to change how they saw me.

Let’s start with letters.

Books. Articles. Poems. Lyrics. They gave me a voice (or, in the case of fiction, many voices). The more I read, the more I thought for myself and differently about myself. The greater the variety of expressions I read, the more beauty I discovered. Art decorates space, music, time. What we read? Our headspace.

Ever the nerd, I now had stories and jokes, with cleverly crafted arguments, and with advice and perspective. Well-practiced in empathy and the capacity to focus outside myself, I became a better friend and listener. Well-exposed to the art of story-telling, I became better at socializing. Well-versed in the poetic, I could talk to girls! Girls!!

Now could science top all that? Wrong question (a valuable lesson in itself!). Where literature helped me establish connections with myself and others, in science and math I found physical and philosophical resources to help me balance among, strengthen, and protect those bonds. Phenomena learned in the pursuit of each served as examples and illustrations of how things work, and how they can malfunction.

The most crucial lesson is that most big things do not occur in a vacuum. Even when there was undeniable genius at play, breakthroughs, developments, and progress come from interactions within the community. And while we often focus on competitors, we would be remiss to ignore the benefits of friendly rivalry and collaboration. It is the latter type of environment I try to create in the classroom.

To enter my classroom is to become a part of an organism, and like any organism it functions best when its parts are running not only independently but also with the same purpose. We practice being active and interactive participants. We acknowledge our unique perspectives and strengths. We take care of and respect each other, lest we sabotage the functioning of the organism. Yet, ours is a special organism in a special environment, for while nature might not smile kindly upon mistakes, we thrive upon them. “Wrong answers” are not reflections of our identities nor our capacities; they are the beginning of the end of insecurity and ignorance, the start of a new understanding of the mind and its processing.

“But what about scores?” Don’t get me wrong--scores are important. They just matter a whole lot less when the goal is mastery, not performance. The difference? Performance is doing well because you know how to put on a good showing. Mastery is doing well simply because you know. Through collaborative, interactive engagement, you don’t just leave the classroom of a master, you leave the class a master yourself.

Together, we’ll embark on a journey to lose my job, because by the end of this, you won’t need me (you probably wouldn’t want me hanging around anyways). You’ll have forged an armory of skills to thrive beyond high school.