The 2023-2024 school year came to an exciting start at Emerson Jr-Sr High School with more fresh faces than anticipated. Within this group is High School Math teacher Mr Hayes. Here’s all there is to know about him:
He is Emerson’s new Geometry, Statistics, and AP Statistics teacher, but before coming to the Family Town, he worked at Hillsborough Township, teaching Algebra 2 and Statistics. It is currently his third year teaching.
Discovering and pursuing his passions wasn’t always easy. Mr. Hayes graduated from George Washington University with a degree in Economics.
“I wasn’t doing anything meaningful, just putting together reports.” He commented as he recalled a past job in which he worked in spreadsheet analysis at a hospital.
It wasn’t until he began tutoring at an after-school program that he discovered his love for teaching and working with kids.
“I learned that teaching suited me and I suited teaching. I liked educating kids and being educated by kids.”
Mr. Hayes attributed his aspirations of becoming a teacher to a love of being in the classroom. As a high school student, his own teachers had made the biggest impact on him, even more so than his family.
He explains how Emerson has given him a door of opportunities that he wouldn’t have had otherwise. It was through this job that he finally got to accomplish his dreams of teaching AP Statistics. Compared to the plethora of math teachers (24 to be exact) at his previous school, at Emerson, many students already consider him an integral part of the community.
“I love it here. I love that it’s a much smaller school. There’s a very strong degree of connectedness between staff and students. Everyone is friendly. There is a lot of positivity.”
In his free time, which he points out “eludes him,” he enjoys playing the guitar, doing crossword puzzles, and paddleboarding.
A valuable message he would like to leave for his students is that “School is not about learning facts and ideas; it’s about developing and exercising your brain for your future. The point of school is to work your brain, to learn how to think. When you get older no one is going to tell you how to think.”
After reading all of that you’re probably confused by the title. “Mr. Hayes sounds like he’s a completely normal guy.” Don’t be confused, just like a distribution, you can’t assume Mr. Hayes is normal, at most he is only approximately normal; you’ll never know what to expect from a teacher like him.
