New Teacher Story: Mr. Smith

This year we have gotten a lot of new teachers in our building. We have had the opportunity to see them grow and develop to how they teach and how they adjusted to Palisade. When we interviewed our new science teachers we found we only had one, Mr. Smith. He was a student teacher under Mr. Torfin for the school year 2021-2022. This year he had taken over Mr. Clabier’s classroom and position. We have all learned to love Mr. Smith as he is funny, nice, dependable, and understanding.

We had the opportunity to interview our new science teacher and ask him a couple of questions. We first asked him why he wanted to even be a teacher in the first place, “The main reason is because I started working as an environmental consultant and there was so much that I learned within that year being a consultant. And I was like ‘Wasn't I taught some of this stuff’ so that kinda sparked the idea ‘I wanna be that person to go back and teach these things that I should have learned in school’. And so kinda my teaching philosophy, my goal is to teach real-life skills that actually matter rather than memorize a bunch of useless information that you may never need.” We asked how he liked the atmosphere at Palisade, “It’s awesome wouldn’t change it for anything, I like the community, the students, the administration, the co-workers, and everything about it is awesome.”

As we can tell, Mr. Smith is settling down perfectly and we should all make sure to try and make him feel welcomed at Palisade.