Mr Keupker
posted in General |This morning’s Daria talked at some length about a teacher-from-hell, her science teacher. I, on the other hand, suffered at the hands of Mr Keupker, math genius. He wasn’t so bad, when I was a junior in High School, in pre-calculus. But when we moved into Senior year and actual Calculus, the devil came out.
Our Calculus class was small; about seven people. We had a very smart transfer from Texas, a Romanian transfer student, some assorted Chess players, and a young lady I had a crush on- a smart, vivacious, athletic woman named Michelle Signor. Who happened to be dating a smart, vivacious wrestler named Nik. One of my vivid memories of Mr Keupker was him standing behind Michelle’s desk wondering aloud “why are you in this class?” as she worked on a class problem. Though she was smart, she was one of those women who believed her press releases- and Math was hard for her. She had enough problems with the “I’m not smart” language she was using that Mr Keupker was just an extra knife in her back.
I struggled along in Calculus- pulling a bare C, until Mr Keupker announced that his theory on education meant that if you got an A on the final test, he’d give you an A for the class (because you’d have learned it by then, right?). So, I felt justified when I finished my test first, turned it in and scored a 91 percent on the test. I was never one of his favorites in the class either. 
