Written by Reed Meeker
Today’s teacher spotlight centers on MVS’s very own Mr. Walker, an upper school mathematics teacher with a surprising set of skills, and a career background I could have truly never guessed. Mr. Walker has been teaching at MVS for around 8 years now, and during our interview mentioned he quite likes it here. When asked about his favorite part of teaching at MVS, he said it was easily the students, stating that compared to most other schools, here you can “trust the students to do the right thing.” It should also be noted that Mr. Walker certainly doesn’t lack school spirit, as every First Friday he can be seen rocking a wig matching his advisory’s color. From what I’ve heard, this has been happening for as long as anyone can remember, and there has yet to have been a wig he can’t pull off.
So Mr. Walker is a shining beacon of MVS school spirit and a great mathematics teacher, but where was Mr. Walker before MVS? How did he get here? You may be surprised to learn that before Mr. Walker was posted up as a mathematics teacher in Dayton, Ohio, he was the Headmaster of a school in China a little south of Shanghai. Talk about being overqualified! Mr. Walker eventually packed his bags and moved to Ohio, where his wife had family. I was absolutely flabbergasted after Mr. Walker had finished recounting his story for me, and quickly became even more surprised as I learned that this was not his only accomplishment! Mr. Walker previously had a career running a theater company in Wisconsin called Saint Croixfalls Theater. They put on numerous different kinds of shows, but a specialty of theirs was “forgotten plays.” Forgotten plays generally consist of old Broadway shows that eventually stopped running and got phased out, forgotten by history. Saint Croixfalls Theater would dig up these old scripts, pick their favorites, and run productions of these shows that potentially hadn’t seen the light of day in decades. Mr. Walker has since retired from this position, but still participates in theater from time to time. Most recently, he starred as Einstein in a production of Relativity.
Mr. Walker truly has a multitude of secret skills he keeps in his back pocket, and even after our interview, I feel I may not have dug up all of them. Some more quick facts about Mr. Walker: he is a proficient juggler, he crafted a large majority of the furniture in his house himself, and he can do a cartwheel. At this point, I wouldn’t be surprised if I learned Mr. Walker had directed a movie or had a mysterious background in street racing and it had just slipped his mind during our interview. Mr. Walker, if either of those statements are true, please email me, I would like to know. And that’s all for this MVS teacher spotlight, what teacher would you like Ram Report to spotlight next?