Many high school teachers have different interests that shape who they are and what they teach. These interests appear not only in their classes but in their past careers as well. Every teacher has different styles of teaching and methods of engaging with their students, and these can be tied to their past experiences. At Wakefield High School, there are a wide range of courses offered, requiring multiple different skills to teach these courses. 

Jung Yu, a math teacher at Wakefield High School, used to work for Sabre, an airline decision systems company. Yu’s job was statistical and modeling tasks, such as optimizing the locations of planes in order to help schedule flights. Yu worked with numerous different people and found that his communication skills greatly improved. 

“[This job] changed me for the better in the sense that I [learned] the importance of communication,” Yu said. “Overall, even if it is not the primary focus of what you are doing, being able to read and write, to communicate, is something important to me.” 

Eric Schacht, a biology and earth science teacher at Wakefield High School, previously worked for a group called the Wyoming Stock Growers Land Trust. His job was to protect land from urban development. His team would identify land to set aside for agricultural purposes, and this land would become contractually protected from any other use. Schacht would present ideas to a board of directors, using his first-hand experience he acquired from the job. 

“[I learned to] communicate and share ideas,” Schacht said.

Austin Tilley is an American history and law and justice teacher at Wakefield High School. Prior to teaching, Tilley worked for a law office at Appalachian State University and then worked in politics in Washington, D.C. While working in politics, Tilley did a lot of work in polling; this included sending people to citizens’ houses and asking who they were voting for. He would do text messaging campaigns as well, he and his team sending hundreds of thousands of texts in a matter of days. 

“I became really good at talking to people with political views that are completely different from mine,” Tilley said. “[I learned] to talk to them in a way that is constructive.” 

Another teacher whose previous career helped prepare him is Jesse Kenyon. Kenyon teaches chemistry and marine ecology at Wakefield High School. Kenyon used to work in programming and analysis for a Duke University climate researcher. Kenyon would acquire large amounts of climate data sets from numerous government agencies, and use that to build computer programs to analyze that data. This data was used to look at how weather events, such as heat waves, respond to various climate cycles. During his time as a climate researcher, he gained a lot of valuable life skills.. 

“[I learned] patience,” Kenyon said. “Rome wasn’t built in a day.” 

All of these teachers have integrated their past careers into the subjects they teach, using what they learned to inspire the next generation. Teaching is not just a job these people do, it is a passion that they have worked towards and dedicated years of their life to. 

“The thought of teaching has always been attractive to me,” Kenyon said. “[Teaching] has been in the back of my mind since high school.”