Have you ever had a teacher that because of them you actually look forward to going to their class? If not, you should move to my school because my teacher of Trig, AP Stats, and Pre-Calc, Mr. Nierstedt, makes you have that surprisingly non-teenager like attitude.

Mr. Nierstedt is a teacher that I really appreciate. He always does everything he can in order to help a student better understand the confusing aspects of the complicated courses he teaches. First of all, its really easy to pay attention to him because plainly and simply, he is loud! He’s not one of those quiet teachers or the ones that have calming “story-time” voices that puts you to sleep. When he is teaching he uses power-point presentations on the smart board that really help us pick out the main ideas and concepts from the chapters we are on. He always pushes us to ask questions if we don’t understand what the notes are saying and if we do he explains it for as long as it takes for us to understand before we move on to the next idea. As much as we hate it, we have homework 99% of the time. But really, as annoying as it is, homework really does help us learn. Each day in the beginning of class he asks us if we have questions on the homework from the previous night. If no one speaks up, he says “(Name here), do you have a question?” to every single person in the room just to make sure we weren’t too chicken to ask. If someone asks a question, he goes through the problem step by step so they will understand. He is constantly drawing pictures to help us solve problems that are hard to grasp by just reading. His class is really fun to be in because he seems to always have a funny story that relates to the main idea of a question in the book. The best part is when the stories sometimes aren’t even funny because he laughs really hard anyways which actually makes it funny.

Because the courses he teaches are sometimes pretty difficult to understand, a lot of kids need extra help aside from the time they can get during class. There are many different times Mr. Nierstedt will help someone if they need it. First, there is EMM which is 30 minutes before school hours. Kids can come in any day to get help with homework or understanding the chapter. He has also given up lunch time, prep time, and after school time to help students. Last summer, he even helped a student prep for a NYS Regents exam even though he didn’t have to. He always seems to dedicate his personal time to do whatever it takes to assist the students.

Another thing Mr. Nierstedt does that, over time, I’ve learned to appreciate is he definitely challenges us. Some questions are really hard and when we ask for “help” we mean “give us the answer already!” Though he doesn’t give us the answer, he may occasionally hint us toward the right direction. We have to really concentrate, but eventually we get the answer ourselves. I really like this about him because in the end we get a great sense of success because we figured something out on our own.

The ability to understand something really depends on the teacher. Learning is made fun when you have a teacher that makes you want to come to class. I believe Mr. Nierstedt is one of those teachers and he deserves to be recognized for it.