Mr. Golden: Gary Golden, also known as Triple O.G, Mr. G or G-dog, has been substitute teaching in the Kirkwood School District for 10 years.
Golden worked for AT&T, was a consultant for a software company and worked in an antique store. After he retired, he then began a job as a sub.
“He’s with it,” Logan Drake, senior, said. “For his age, he can just relate to all of us. He gets us.”
Although students know him to be the hip, fist-bumping teacher, there was a point of time where Golden did not connect as well with the students.
“When I first started doing this, I was going to try to sub the way I thought it should be, based on my school experience 50 years ago,” Golden said. “After about a year of not being able to communicate with the kids, I decided that you pick your battles and things are a lot more relaxed than when I went to school.”
Golden is now accustomed to today’s high school students, and while he’s usually the one teaching, he also gets a lot back from them.
“To me it’s a fun experience and being around kids keeps you young,’” Golden said. “And you pick up key words, like ‘the bomb.’”
Mr. Johnson: When walking into a classroom and finding a comic strip on the desk, most likely a panel from “Zits” or “Pearls Before Swine,” students can guess Charlie Johnson is their sub.
“Mathematics is hard, so you have to find an element of fun in teaching mathematics, so I try to do things that make students either laugh or energize to want to do the hard work,” Johnson said.
Johnson usually starts out class with a few trivia questions and awards the students that guess with the right answer with candy.
Although Johnson adds a fun atmosphere to the classroom, he takes teaching students very seriously. One of his favorite quotes is, ‘A teacher affects eternity; he never tell, where his influence stops,’ by Henry B. Adams.
“I have him a lot and he is very knowledgeable on a lot of different subjects. He is one of the only subs I have ever had that can take any subject and teach it almost fluently if not fluently,” Matt Conaway, junior, said.
Johnson has been in the Kirkwood School District for three years, the only district he has ever taught in.
“There were days in my ‘real job’ [as a engineer] when I did not necessarily want to get up to go to work. I cannot say that about this,” Johnson said.
