🦆Odd-Duck Teachers’ Wacky Hobbies🦆 

Hobbies, hobbies, hobbies. We all have them. Some of us like to draw, others play video games, and some even herd ducks. But what about our teachers? Contrary to popular belief, teachers do, in fact, have lives outside of school, and those lives don’t just include grading our tests. 

So what do teachers do for fun? Well, after extensive research, I’ve learned that teachers’ hobbies are… interesting to say the least.

Mark Schneider, a United States History and Expository Writing teacher, has a very, let’s say, interesting hobby. Every third Tuesday evening at 7:37 pm, Schneider Facetimes Peter Alexander, alumnus and esteemed journalist, and they synchronously learn and practice dances to all of Beyoncé’s songs.

This hobby started harmlessly when the two of them decided to learn the choreography for “Single Ladies,” but since then, this hobby has become increasingly important in both of their lives. They now frequently avoid their responsibilities in order to perfect their choreography.

Instead of grading the History 10 Catalyst project, you’ll find Schneider creating choreography for all of Beyoncé’s songs, including “Crazy in Love,” “Halo,” “Cuff It,” “Break my Soul,” and “Formation.” 

It isn’t just Schneider who has a strange hobby, there are STEM teachers with strange hobbies as well; Owen vonK, Chris Harper, Chris Kinney, and Harmony Ausiello build rockets together. And every Sunday at dawn, they climb to the top of Mount Diablo and shoot these rockets off the edge of the mountain. And these aren’t just any rockets, oh no: these rockets are made from graded physics and math exams.

Some may call it symbolic, or even beautiful, that these teachers shoot old exams off of a mountain by making them into rockets, but I’m mostly just worried about the safety of this hobby. What if the rocket catches on fire? Or what if they accidentally use tests that still haven’t been graded; do the students automatically fail? Keep that in mind when you look at your physics or math report card and are confused by the grade you got.

Maybe your teacher just shot your exam off of a mountain and forgot to put it into the grade book. Or maybe they decided to practice their “Lemonade” choreography instead of grading your essay. You never know…