By Ernest Wolf, staff writer
“Ernest! We have a sub in Algebra today!” I heard my friend yelling as we greeted each other in the hallway after I had walked up 3 flights of stairs on a cold fall morning before class. The sky outside was cloudy and the hallway smelled like sweat and food, as it did most gloomy mornings at Galileo. “Wait really?” I said with excitement, hoping this class would lift my gloomy mood, not knowing what was about to happen.
As an overwhelmed freshman, I usually liked having a substitute teacher because it allowed me to catch up on work I was missing and talk to my new friends. But this substitute teacher, well, he wasn’t your typical sub. As soon as my friend and I walked into class he told us to sit down immediately and not to make any noise. The excitement I had felt just seconds earlier left my body as I realized this guy wasn’t here to play games or let us have a “free” day. “Ugh, I wish we just had our regular teacher,” I whispered to my friend as I looked at him with displeasure.
In my mind, I was thinking this guy was just going to make us either listen to a pointless lecture or give us a worksheet and not let us make talk or enjoy ourselves at all, as most strict subs do. As we all sat down in our hard plastic seats, he immediately yelled and startled the whole class. We all looked at him confused. “Okay, now that I’ve got your attention I want you all to go through some breathing exercises with me,” he said in an odd tone. Me and my friend exchanged a confused glance as we had never done this in class before. We all went through the breathing exercises with him which pretty much just consisted of us all taking deep breaths.
After that was over he asked the class for a volunteer to pass out worksheets for the day. “Oh great, here we go” I said in an irritated tone to my friend, as I hoped to just catch up on some classwork I was missing from earlier in the week. As I began working on the worksheet with my friend, the substitute teacher asked for our attention. As everyone looked up at him with anticipation, he began telling us he was going to give us a lecture. “Great!” I thought to myself, “Just what we all needed”, still in a gloomy mood. He started the lecture off by teaching us some basic algebra, material we had already covered earlier in the semester. However, I noticed that he began to get completely off topic.
We went from learning about quadratic equations, to learning about ancient mayan civilizations, and then to quantum leaks. This guy was hilarious too! He actually had the whole class entertained and captivated with his lecture. It got to the point where we weren’t really even learning about math. The whole class was just having a discussion about random topics, it was super fun! My gloomy mood from earlier in that morning disappeared as I was now fully immersed in class and enjoying every minute of it. Towards the end of class he helped us finish our worksheet and go on about our day. I left that block in a great mood and even better memories. That was definitely the most memorable classes I had freshman year and maybe even throughout all of high school.
