Granby High School welcomes two new faces, not only new to the school but new to the world of teaching. We sat down with Jordan Lee and Callum Farmer to get to know them better and to get their take on what their first year of teaching at Granby has been like.

Walking into room 243, you can find yourself in a seasonally decorated lab classroom with a wall of windows overlooking the teacher parking lot near the gym. In this sunlit room, you’ll find first-year teacher Lee planning lessons for his classes, or figuring out how to turn old physics equipment left behind into usable devices for experiments. 

Lee, a graduate of Old Dominion University, teaches International Baccalaureate Diploma Programme Physics 1 and 2, Pre-Physics, and AP Physics 1. That’s a lot–especially for a first-year teacher–to take in all at once. Having never taught at this level before, Lee is always looking for ways to improve his teaching style. In our interview, he mentioned he is most looking forward to  “improving his work so far.” Later, Lee addressed that sometimes in his class, “We’ll be going through the lesson and stuff, and I’ll be like ‘Oh my God, I could’ve done that so much better,’ or ‘That was terrible and I never want to do that again.’” This is an attitude that he takes back to his classes every day. While you may find him in his classroom teaching, he is constantly learning how to improve and get his students a better understanding of the deeply confusing and difficult subjects that he covers in class, an attribute of a truly dedicated teacher.  Lee said that the most crucial part of teaching is being able to form a connection with students and facilitate an environment where they can learn most easily.

Take a short trip down the hallway, and you can find Farmer, a 2022 graduate of Old Dominion University, who also graduated from Granby with the Class of 2018. Farmer teaches algebra functions and data analysis as well as AP Calculus AB. In our talk, we wanted to see how different things were at Granby now, compared to when he graduated. “The set of people that I hung out with in high school, and the people who were in my classes versus the classes that I teach now are very different.” Farmer, who took five AP classes in his senior year, said that there has been a large change in the overall mentality students have towards their success in the classrooms. Farmer said that during COVID-19, when classes went online, cheating and a drastic decrease in the rigor and expectations of students occurred. 

Becoming a teacher can be an eye-opening experience; it comes not only with the responsibility of making sure your students learn and grow, but also understanding where your students are coming from every day. On the first day of school, Farmer had each of his students answer two questions on an index card: What are you proud of and what is your goal? Three separate individuals wrote, ”I’m proud of making it to seventeen; my goal is to make it to eighteen, and I’m proud of being alive,” he said. Farmer keeps this memory in the back of his mind when he interacts with his students because sometimes “math is just ancillary to the much greater challenges they face in life. So extending compassion in a way that I’ve never really had to do before is something that has guided me.” With this in mind, Farmer mentioned that he feels that “good things are happening here” at Granby. He ended the interview saying that he is most looking forward to graduation this June, commenting that “seeing the culmination of all those good things when the students walk across the stage…is gonna be a moment that I remember.”