Before  the whiteboards

        Mr. Gerrit Rickwalt is a notable figure at this school, he's was the spearhead for our astronomy program, an alumni of Conroe High (1992), and possibly most interestingly, a officer in the naval reserve. Mr. Rickwalt has always loved the navy and has gone on two tours, the second one being in Africa.

      "My time in Africa gave me a completely different perspective when I got back. It made me appreciate a lot more of what we have, and it frustrates me a lot more when I see how many things our students have that they take for granted. So right now is D lunch, and you can probably walk in there and find trash cans full of perfectly usable food that’s just being wasted. You’ll have students that came into a nice brand new classroom, air conditioned, climate controlled, with all the supplies they need and then they’ll fall asleep or they won’t be paying attention to the lessons. Meanwhile over in Africa, I got to visit some of the schools and meet some of the students there. A lot of them didn’t even have shoes. The classrooms didn’t have floors but every single one of them comes to school every day with books, something to write with, something to write on, and are grateful even for that dirty, dusty, non-air conditioned, no-window-having, malaria mosquito-infested school.” 

    I hope that puts our lives here at Conroe into some perspective.

     As many of us ponder what exactly is a 'fine art' per say, you'll probably come to the conclusion it's about suffering, dedication, time, effort, pouring every ounce of your soul into your art! Sounds a bit tiring doesn't it? Luckily, one Ms. Rebecca Babbitt agreed.

    “I was working professional theater, which meant you worked a lot of nights and you worked holidays. This one year I was leaving my house New Year’s Day after New Year’s Eve and I was leaving a bunch of friends at my house and I thought to myself, ‘what am I doing?’. I was probably about 27 and I was thinking, ‘hmmm maybe I don’t wanna do this particular part of this anymore.’ I learned a lot from doing professional theater, and it’s not something that you can sustain. I mean physically you can’t sustain it; timewise, family, BUT when I came to teaching it was like, 'wow I know a lot of stuff.'" 

    Now she's one of our two theater arts teacher, and has lost none of the passion for her art, sharing it with our generation of theater kids.

     If modern media has taught us anything it's that our teachers are heartless, cruel, soulless demons summoned by our superintendent to torture us and keep order in our scholastic prison! Now if we're done being dramatic, I think we'll all agree that there's at least SOME humanity in our teachers, take Mr. Brian Johnson, a humble geometry teacher. He used to work in the oil field, and was promoted to a managerial position. He hated it.

    “I was a boss working with six managers underneath me and a technical manager, and other than those seven I had 250 employees. It was an absolute zoo. I was the manager of all those people, if somebody got arrested for a drug problem or got arrested for a job, I had to make difficult decisions. Do I fire this individual? Do I give them some grace? Do I give them some time to get out of jail? I had one engineer whose wife was arrested, and he needed to stay home from the job, but it was my job to get the work done. One day my boss walked in and said, you’ve got 205 field people, and you need to get rid of 30 of them. Fire them. So I started compiling a list of all my engineers from one to 205 and I got the bottom 30 and started calling them into my office and firing them. [...] I was about halfway through when my boss came in and said we needed to fire some more. Before I got that done, he came in and said I needed to fire some more. About the time he got done I had 65 degreed engineers. It was brutal.” 

     I suppose that’s as good a lesson as any about corporate priorities, but on an even more poignant note, it shows just how human our teachers are. But for those of us who think themselves unfortunate for not having our all-star Mr. Miagi teachers, worry not! I guarantee that every teacher in our school has found their way to teaching in a zig-zagging line of one adventure after another, in fact I'm sure they'd be happy to tell you all about who they were Before The Whiteboard